There’s a widening gap between the cost of delivering social services and the funding constraints of doing so — report.
In a new study titled Real Costs, Real Impacts: A Path to Social Services Sustainability, Professor David Gilchrist, the director of the University of Western Australia’s Centre for Public Value, paints a grim picture of numerous organisations’ capability to sustain their operations amid government cost-cutting and rising demand for their services.
“The sector is less able to deliver services at the quality and quantity that must be delivered. This results in a reduction of the service mix that is required to meet services needs in the community,” Gilchrist said. “Organisations are becoming less and less able to provide services in a financially sustainable way.”
Gilchrist, who has been probing human services delivery costs for decades, said the study was the first to look at the problem through the lens of social service organisations’ financial sustainability experience.
“This project is different because rather than looking at population level data where we are examining the cost of service delivery for a group of organisations or from a government’s perspective, we’ve taken seven case studies and looked in much greater depth and detail at the cost of human services delivery for each of them.“
Much of the sector’s service delivery financial pain could be traced back to governments’ efforts to reduce the cost of service delivery, as this frequently proved to be counterproductive in the longer term. What’s making the problem worse was the lack of communication between government departments about the best way to deliver services.
Gilchrist called for a more transparent approach to service delivery, in which the focus was shifted to giving organisations enough money to meet community need, rather than making them work with what spendthrift governments suppose they need to get the job done.
Read also: Happenings on the Hill – What do I do now my government funding is ending?
Geraldine is currently the Content Producer for Third Sector, an Akolade channel. Throughout her career, she has written for various industries and international audiences. Her love for writing extends beyond the corporate world, as she also works as a volunteer writer at her local church. Aside from writing, she is also fond of joining fun runs and watching musicals.
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