Consumer-based feedback from Glenn Enquiry long overdue, and welcome, says Academic, Practitioner, & Social Services Outcomes Researcher

The release of the “Peoples Report” generated from the Glenn Enquiry is the first public enquiry into Domestic Violence and Child Abuse that significantly privileges the Consumers voice, while dovetailing into some practical solutions, and is both long-overdue, and welcome, says Steve Taylor, Counselling & Family Therapy Director at 24-7 Ltd, and Social Services Outcomes Researcher.

“70 years of social service outcome research reveals that the stronger the voice of the Consumer, the more effective a social service can become, providing that this service has effective routine outcome measurements in place” says Mr Taylor.

“It has been an open secret in New Zealand that the Family Court and CYF are utterly, utterly dysfunctional institutions, and what has made these organisations so dysfunctional is that the voices of Consumers brutalised by these institutions have been deliberately and covertly silenced through fear, control, and intimidation, characteristics which are at the very core of the enquiry – child abuse and domestic violence”.

“I note that there is a call by Consumers for a more sophisticated and integrated level of training, intervention, and service provision, and these factors certainly have an important place in improving consumer outcomes – but again only in the presence, not the absence, of routine outcome measurement of services”.

“For me, the most influential recommendation that I can see rapidly improving service provision is in the establishment of an independent forum for consumers to lay complaints, although such a forum would need to have meaningful powers to name, shame, censure, and stand down incompetent and unethical practitioners, otherwise it would just be another toothless self-governed professional association designed to protect its own, similar to the New Zealand Law Society, or the New Zealand Association of Counsellors” said Mr Taylor.

“In Social Services, as in every other industry, we must be able to measure success and failure, otherwise we will most often achieve failure” said Mr Taylor.

ENDS

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