Eighty per cent of community sector services in Australia have said they do not have enough resources to properly support the vulnerable people seeking their help, a report by the Australian Council of Social Service (Acoss) has found.
A separate report, a funding survey by Mental Health Australia, found 41% of mental health organisations had experienced a reduction in services because of funding uncertainty and 40% had experienced a loss of staff.
The Acoss survey (pdf), released on Monday, questioned almost 1,000 people working in the community sector, which employs 919,000 people and engages 2 million volunteers. It found 80% of workers said they were under-resourced and the perceived living standards of people on low incomes were declining.
The young unemployed were perceived to be suffering the sharpest decline.
The chief executive of Weave Youth and Community Services, Shane Brown, said the organisation had just suffered a $300,000 cut in state funding for a program to help children stay in school and the personal stories behind the statistics in the report were devastating.
“For some children it [inadequate funding of the community sector] means dropping out of school at the end of primary school and not continuing with their education because they have had bad experiences. For some young people instead of therapeutic support they end up in jail. For a lot of young people it means remaining homeless and living on the streets rather than moving to a refuge or public housing,” he said.
“For some parents, particularly single mums, it means losing their children rather than getting into a program to help them develop their parenting skills.”
Brown said Weave supported 7,000 people a year, 1,700 of them intensively, and there was a growing waiting list of about 30 people who wanted access to their services.
“The federal government rationalised funding for Indigenous programs. There are 150 programs reduced to five and we still don’t know who’s going to get funding,” he said.
“A lot of the funding we get is to support Indigenous people and their families, there is constant pressure on funding.”
The mental health survey found a loss of trust in government among management and staff in 85% of respondents, and 56% had had no communication about the future of their commonwealth funding.
Most government-funded mental health services work on funding contracts over three years, but the federal government extended a batch of contracts at the end of the last financial year for 12 months, with no word on whether the funding would continue after that.
The chief executive of the Top End Association for Mental Health (Team Health), Helen Egan, said that made it difficult to attract and retain staff.
The funding uncertainty meant diminished quality of services and low staff morale, she said.
“Northern Territory health already have waiting lists, and waiting lists will extend and become longer. If you can only fill positions with short-term contract staff then the quality of services are at risk of diminishing because staff are not able to be well trained,” she said.
“Continuity with relationships with clients in particular will be limited – if you’ve been working effectively with someone for some months and the worker changes again and ... again it starts to affect the ability for people to continue their recovery.
“In rural and remote areas it is always a challenge to recruit suitably qualified staff – if you start to lose some of your staff at various levels in organisation then you’re limiting the quality of services.”
Egan and Brown said community sector organisations and mental health services needed funding certainty to keep working effectively.
