Submission: Out of Home Care Strategy Issues Paper

ACTCOSS welcomed the opportunity to provide comment on the Out of Home Care Strategy Issues Paper. Our comments reflected our concerns with the narrow perspective of the paper and suggested the need for a focus on:

• early intervention and prevention, with a specific focus on reducing demand for out of home care
• a whole-of-government approach including government agencies such as Health, Housing, Justice and Community Safety, and Education and Training
• groups who are particularly vulnerable to engagement in the care and protection system, including people with disability, people with mental illness, and people with alcohol and other drug problems
• the voices of parents who are involved in, or are at risk of entering, the out of home care system.

We also developed extra questions under each ‘focus area’ in the paper we think need to be asked in order to strengthen the overall analysis of issues and development of the strategy.