New Approaches to Supporting People with Complex Needs
This report shares the learning from a Churchill Fellowship about innovative approaches to supporting individuals with complex needs in Australia. It focuses mainly on a programme initiated in Victoria in 2002, hoping that the learning will support the development of better responses in the UK. Since the turn of the millennium in both Australia and the United Kingdom, there has been a growing awareness of a shared problem. Both countries have seen poor responses from health, welfare and justice services to a small but significant group of people with multiple and complex needs. These needs – health, behavioural, practical, emotional and skills-based, in addition to both victimisation from and perpetration of crime – exacerbate and reinforce one another.
People with these needs tend to have multiple and confused diagnoses and experience repeated episodes of crisis that are demanding of services. They have poor living skills and a chaotic lifestyle, and a lack of social networks. And they exhibit behaviour which is at the least disruptive and at worst a risk to themselves or others. The key question that arises is how can services across both the public and independent sectors improve their response to these people.
This report covers:
- Main impressions – including the shared problem, emerging responses, barriers to innovation and overcoming these barriers
- Introduction to Australia, the Fellowship, the trip and the constraints
- Models for the most complex – including Multiple and Complex Needs Initiative (MACNI), Integrated Services Project (ISP) and the
- Complex Needs Coordination Project
- Diversionary case management interventions
- Responses to mental health needs and learning disabilities in the prison estate
- Revisiting an existing approach: problem-solving courts
- Extending an existing approach: Medically Supervised Injecting Centre
- Acquired Brain Injury.
