Future Respite Needs

Each year Carinbundi looks to its families and other stakeholders to identify areas for potential growth in response to unmet needs. As you can imagine, respite is an are where we will always have an unmet need.

While this service does not have a waiting list due to the belief that every family should receive some support, this practice means that each year the amount of respite available decreases for individuals. We therefore will always have an unmet need in relation to being able to meet the need sof all our families.

While we are always looking at ways to increase our capacity, we at Carinbundi like to work towards specifice goal areas. These are currently:

Teenage respite: Following thesuccesful opening of our Children's house in 2007, we have been working at capacity and increasing our numbers each week. We have noticed however that we have a real need for age specific respite for those in our community in the 12 to 17 age group. While the Children's House provides a great service to the 0 to 11 group and the Adult Centre provides for the older groups, it seems the teens are missing out on quality, age appropriate repsite. This we will work on in the coming year.
Ageing Carers: Whilst Carinbundi is providing a large amount of respite to this age group through its Older Parent Carer Project, we would love to have the resources to offer more. Currently we provide a range of options to our older carers through centre based respite, in-home and community based options, holiday groups at the Bargara house, as well as the Acvtivity Centre and trips away. One of the key outcomes for the Older Parent Carer Project was the development of individual plans identifying long term accommodation requirements. Our goal over the coming year is to identify further capacity so we can begin to arrange longer periods of co-tenancy type respite to identify possible positive accommodation options for the future.
High Support Needs: One of the critical areas we currently are unable to adequately respond to is a respite option for families caring for loved ones with high medical or physical support needs. To do this may mean the establishment of a further facility for this group or renovating the current facility. There are a number of issues around providing support for individuals with high support needs. Being an organisation which receives block funding for respite, (that is, we have a certain number of dollars for the year and once it is gone, we are unable to stay open) we find oursleves sometimes having to provided one to one support where the needs warrant it. We do not for a minute begrudge doing this, however we run the risk of not being able to provide for other families who may be next in line. We are also looking at the needs of the Children's House and what that is going to mean for the main facility in ten or fifteen years.