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...
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…
