What Does Good Support Look Like? Rethinking the Priorities that Drive our Support Systems

Like many others, I have spent large periods of time trying to navigate complex systems that are there to provide support – sometimes this support is financial, sometimes in the form of access to treatment and care or other services.

I have also worked and lead teams in some of these systems, viewing them through the eyes of a regulator, a service provider, a customer and a support person.

Each experience has taught me that despite promoting a narrative of individual care, the central driver of many of these systems continues to be preventing access to support to those people the system deems unworthy of help in the pursuit of saving costs.

This central driver is reflected in the myriads of processes and policies designed to make a person prove that they have a right to access care or continue their access.

These processes and policies are the red tape that we are told is necessary to prevent fraud or inappropriate use of funds. Having seen some of the fraud that has been committed in schemes, I can understand this.

What these systems don’t recognise is the very real and significant impact that this approach has on those that are in a vulnerable state. Which is the whole reason that they are asking for care and support in the first place.

When my husband was injured in a workplace accident earlier this year, we were told that the system would take care of him.

What they didn’t tell us, is that the system would be so slow that it couldn’t keep up with his evolving needs and instead became an exhausting burden that we had to navigate on top of his injury.

The system didn’t seem to understand how it feels to be injured in an accident, unsure of what your life is going to look like in the coming weeks, months or years, and be handed reams of paperwork to complete on a regular basis.

Paperwork that often can only be completed and signed in physical copy, so you now need to add trips to Officeworks or a friend’s place that happens to have a printer/scanner on top of medical appointments, rehabilitation sessions and trips to the pharmacy.

The system doesn’t recognise that not everyone has the same ability to care for themselves at home. That not every family has external supports to help when a person is incapacitated and that the workload somehow triples with one person missing.

Instead, the system asks you to quantify a person’s contributions to your household in hours without guidance on what type of support they can offer you. Then it writes you a letter denying your request months after you really needed it, stating that it was reasonable to expect that the personal care your husband required would be provided by yourself, even though you work for yourself and have no access to paid leave, have two young children with high needs and are coping with your own loss.

You just lost the life with the person you loved. All your plans for the coming year, all the small moments and habits that are the foundations of your relationship.

For the foreseeable future, that is gone, and you are trying to adjust because everyone is looking to you to navigate the path forward even though you’re making this all up as you go.

Then, while you are adjusting, you realise that of the four different case workers and support people you’ve engaged with since the accident, none of them are measuring your husband’s return to work outcomes in terms of his health and wellbeing.

You realise that his return-to-work plan is entirely centred around getting him back into the work environment, measuring success by the increase in hours, not an increase in mobility or reduction in pain.

The case manager’s measures of success are ensuring a cost-effective rehabilitation plan, which explains why they asked if your husband could take a bus to work when he wasn’t cleared to drive, even though it would require him to walk 1.2km on a mix of footpaths and road, change buses twice and take up to 75 minutes to travel one-way instead of a short 7-minute car ride.

I don’t share this to shame the individuals that I’ve encountered, who have created burden when I thought they were there to remove some.?

I share this because at the heart of this problem is that the system is driven by a need to exclude those they believe don't deserve support from accessing it, which ends up creating roles and functions that are centred on compliance and cost rather than on the real outcomes that matter to people’s lives.

Vulnerable people are being asked to invest precious time and energy that should be focused on their health and recovery on endless paperwork, constant self-advocacy and meeting compliance milestones.

By framing support around compliance and cost, we inadvertently devalue the dignity and agency of those seeking help. When individuals are forced to repeatedly “prove” they need support, they’re left feeling like they must remain vulnerable just to maintain assistance.

Imagine the shift if, instead, we began by asking,

“What does good support look like for you?”

This simple question could transform those working in these systems from gatekeepers into true allies, helping claimants define and work towards the goals that matter most to them.

Shifting to an outcomes-driven approach, rooted in enquiry and compassion, could foster systems where individuals feel respected, heard and empowered to shape their path forward.

As leaders, regulators and advocates, we have the power to create systems that respect people’s dignity and prioritise recovery, growth and wellbeing.

Let’s start by looking at how our systems, policies and processes can offer true care by empowering individuals, making them partners in their recovery journey and fostering outcomes that truly matter.

#systems #change #empathy #outcomes #treatment #care