Social service challenges in CoffeeTown

Coffee-Town Problem

Human Service Plan

Coffee-Town is an area with great social service professionals that do a great job of service delivery to help the people of the community. However, even with the great performance there are some shortfalls and shortcomings that are under way whereby people are unable to get the full depth and breadth of the services that they need. In addition, the bureaucracy of all of the different social services and how they do (or do not) fit together is creating a headache and a substantial amount of time spent to get each of the individual services. To ameliorate this condition, there will be suggestions made to absolve the problem in addition to some other suggestions and pointers that will aid the overall progress. While there are challenges that can inhibit changing the status quo for the people that need services and the people that deliver them, these conditions and issues are entirely addressable.

Action Plan

On the whole, there are two major issues that are causing quality of care and/or amount of scare vis-a-vis social services to be ineffectual or at least slower and more plodding than it needs to be. The first is the overall difference and dispareity between the intake procedures of all of the agencies. While there probably must and should be differences here and there, they should be at a bare minimum and only when the situation or agency goal demands it. For example, proving income (or lack thereof) should be basically the same (if not identical) from agency to agency. People in need of social services have children to raise and jobs to find, among other important things. Tying them up for the better part of a day or more is lunacy and this should absolutely be addressed. The time of the agency personnel is valuable but so is the time of the people who are applying. They should not be made to make arrangements and plan time that is truly not necessary when other priorities clearly exist for the people involved on both sides of the desk. Any agency that is subject to roughly the same rules and regulations (e.g. HIPAA) can probably be made to have the same overall intake process. In fact, one could go so far as to take an application once with all information that may or may not be relevant and then automatically forward it to the intake people with each department. Collecting the information once per agency or even not just collecting all the information that could or definitely will be relevant is just smart to get done on the initial meeting rather than requiring unnecessary follow-ups. This is not to say that follow-ups are entirely preventable, but it should never be because of not doing something in a way that is streamlined as reasonably possible for all affected/involved agencies or because the information simply wasn't asked for and it was readily available. Also, letting the people applying for social services know what is need in terms of documentation and information BEFORE they show up for their one (and hopefully only) meeting and mailing them a summary of the same would save a lot of time.

Of course, obstacles can and will present themselves as it pertains to the above. Not all people applying for aid are going to have the required documentation or information and it may be found that the information presented is misrepresented. As such, some of the problems and issues are presented by things that social service agencies cannot control. Sometimes, it is even something that the applicant cannot control (or at least control easily) such as lack of access to quality childcare, being robbed or otherwise victimized by a stranger or even a family member and so forth. However, these obstacles can be offset and battled by referring people to agencies when it is clear that they will or might need help from those agencies and things like pamphlets and taxi services (to address the second major issue, that being access to transportation) to help people get to and from would also help greatly since access to reliable transportation is obviously an issue for people that need social services. Metro transit, if available is also a good option and usually much cheaper than just about anything else available. Home visits by social service personnel are also an option of there are a lot of kids or older people involved as transporting either is a challenge, to be sure. The visiting person can let the applicant know in advance what is needed, collect all of the needed information once and then the proverbial social safety net floodgate can open until it is no longer needed.

The plan above breaks down the bureaucracy and helps to eliminate the differences that are present by ignorance and complacency rather than legal requirement or regulation. There can and will be situations where requirements must differ but shuttling a person from one agency to another when it can be a giant consumer of time for both the agency and the applicant is just wasteful and truly unnecessary. Government agencies, both social service and otherwise, should work in concert and not against each other due to territorial spats or otherwise. Agency-specific procedures and processes that must be present for legal or other good reason should obviously not be done away with but they should be managed and crafted in a way that keeps things as efficient as possible both within the confines of that particular agency as well as it how relates to when those same applications and people work with other agencies. Agencies of all levels do this already and they do it with each other. For example, state tax agencies use the same basic W-2 as the federal tax agency, that being the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and that makes things easier for everyone involved. To have a standardized way to present the same information to all of the known or possible agencies that could be involved at some point is just smart. Even smarter would be to store the information digitally and forward in that manner, but of course in a HIPAA-compliant way (and in accordance with any other laws, of course). There is a way to make the overall experience smoother and better without infringing on the law or on anyone's privacy.