Practitioners should actively work with families to overcome barriers to participation. Potential barriers could include:
Ensure services are delivered in accessible locations and remove logistical barriers.
There are many different barriers to participation that clients may face. Below are some examples of how we can remove potential barriers to participation. The techniques adopted will depend on the barriers individual clients or families face.
Practitioners should discuss potential barriers to participation with their clients and identify the best possible resolution to ensure the client can continue to receive the support they need.
Provide services online: this can remove any geographical or transport barriers clients may face.
Provide services in central locations: ensure activities are available to a large amount of people and may be close to public transport.
Provide services in spaces clients already access: e.g. the local GP or hospital. The removes the need for clients to find the service.
Provide child care: enable parents with caring responsibilities to participate in activities and receive the services they need.
Provide transportation: this could include picking up and dropping off clients directly or providing a bus or car pool service. It could also include providing clients with vouchers for public transport, taxi etc.
Offer services in multiple languages and translate resources: enables clients who speak and/or read languages other than English to access to same resources. Practitioners who speak the same languages as clients can foster positive relationships.
Motivational interviewing: can help participants identify their own reasons for participating in a program. Motivational interviewing is a client-centred counselling style for eliciting behaviour change by helping clients to explore and resolve ambivalence. It can help clients identify their own personal barriers to accepting or receiving support and better enable them to engage with support services.
A lack of cultural safety can be a particular barrier to participation for Aboriginal people and communities. Lack of cultural safety, racism and fear can prevent Aboriginal people from accessing essential services. Adopting a whole of organisation approach to cultural safety requires consideration of the policies and focus of the service, the physical location and environment, management and governance systems, human resources, and organisational processes. Cultural safety should be embedded into the organisation’s way of working and not be an add-on component of practice.
A successful strategy to promote service access is also co-designing programs with Aboriginal community members to ensure that their needs are met. Inflexibly delivering externally developed programs that do not respond to local service needs was described in the literature as culturally unsafe (Freeman et al, 2014).
The Cultural Safety and Wellbeing Evidence review identified six critical elements and associated example implementation activities that were common across the evidence to ensure the cultural safety and wellbeing of Aboriginal children, young people, families and communities in early support services. These are summarised as follows:
Organisations and practitioners should consider these critical elements and example implementation activities in the design and delivery of services in order to ensure there are no potential barriers to participation through a lack of cultural safety. See the Cultural Safety and Wellbeing Evidence Review for more information.
This flexible activity has been implemented with a number of different target groups, key characteristics include:
The e-Parenting Program and SafeCare+ both used motivational interviewing to help participants identify their own reasons for participating in the program.
While online/digital programs can reduce geographical or transportation barriers, financial barriers may still exist. Organisations would need to ensure clients have the technology needed to participate in online activities (e.g. devices, internet, software).
25 Nov 2022
We acknowledge Aboriginal people as the First Nations Peoples of NSW and pay our respects to Elders past, present, and future.
Informed by lessons of the past, Department of Communities and Justice is improving how we work with Aboriginal people and communities. We listen and learn from the knowledge, strength and resilience of Stolen Generations Survivors, Aboriginal Elders and Aboriginal communities.
You can access our apology to the Stolen Generations - external site .