Place Based Integrated Services

Why is this important?

Services are often designed and delivered to meet the needs of a broad mix of people and/or regions. This approach results in ‘everyone getting the same’ service, not the service they actually need. To complicate this further, funding is often isolated to individual service providers, resulting in poor cohesion and continuity in service delivery by providers to clients.

Integrating services on a place basis allows them to tailor what they do to suit local conditions and coordinate so that they complement not duplicate each other.

We know that when multiple services are delivered in a cohesive and integrated way people, families and the community get better outcomes, have better visibility of all the ‘good services’ available to them, and feel like the system is working hard to help them.

What is this?

Services in specific high need/high opportunity places work in an integrated way to optimise service delivery to enable the best outcomes based upon:

• Effective coordination of services
• Population needs (e.g. high refugee population)
• Specific community context, (e.g. prevalence of ice addiction)
• Needs and gaps in provision (e.g. not enough overnight housing)
• Community involvement
• Connection to community development initiatives.

Place Based Integrated Services are enabled NGO’s and Agencies that have:

• Joint leadership and planning on the ground
• Collective prioritisation of service delivery
• Evaluation through a common place-based scorecard

What is this not?

It is not limited to or dependent on co-location.