Author Description

The New Zealand Government is trialling a new model to improve access to health and education services for children and young people in care, entering care, or at risk of coming into care. 'Access to Services' (ATS) is being trialled in the Waitemata and Bay of Plenty areas from October 2017 to April 2019 and involves direct purchasing when publicly funded services are exhausted, unavailable, or not available in a timely way. This report presents the findings and recommendations of a process evaluation of this 'enhanced brokerage' model, conducted to inform on-going development and future evaluation design. It investigates how brokerage and direct purchasing are best implemented into the current Gateway Assessment system processes, what the expected outcomes for children and young people should be, and the strengths and challenges of the implementation and how a rollout could be improved. The evaluation period was from 18 October 2017 to 22 May 2018.