Integrating Services to Meet Citizens’ Complex Needs

Traditional models of service delivery have not been uniformly effective at addressing the complexity of needs of the most disadvantaged citizens.  The simultaneous experience of multiple forms of disadvantage and social exclusion puts citizens at risk of multiple, entrenched, or cyclical disadvantage.  The Australian Public Service has been implementing reforms that aim to improve the effectiveness of human services.  The reforms call for services to be flexible and responsive to the needs of citizens, and outline a “tell us once” approach where citizens are not required to retell their stories to multiple service providers.  This is especially important for the most disadvantaged citizens.  One aspect of the public sector reforms has been to integrate social policy across agencies, as well as at the program delivery level, with the intention of fully addressing the complex needs of the most disadvantaged citizens.  This paper will use homelessness policy as a lens to examine the Australian public sector reforms, with a particular focus on innovations in providing disadvantaged citizens with effectively integrated services.