The end of FHBH and the future
The last 2-year contract was aimed at allowing state governments around Australia, now responsible for Indigenous housing, to use and integrate the Housing for Health method, principles and products into their work. We see limited signs of this happening but perhaps we are misjudging the situation.
HH looks forward to progress on the following:
– The 4th edition of the National Indigenous Housing Guide (due out in 2009) edited and produced by the federal government. As a key plank of the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing projects being completed with $5.5bn around Australia, this is a key tool for design guidance, documenting past successes or failures and an evaluation tool for all new and upgraded house projects
– A set of concise house function data, consistently produced by all states showing the results of the National Partnership Agreement projects around Australia.
– Seeing this data from all the inspections of completed houses (new and upgraded) in a publicly available place, in the same way that all the FHBH data was, and still is, made publicly available by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
– The practical applied research and development projects continued and expanded by the states. With the unprecedented funds available to all states we would assume that the 50 R&D projects, completed between 2005 and 2011 by the FHBH program, will be exceeded and the scope of the works broadened.
– Information on the percentage of all the Indigenous staff being used on the National Partnership Agreement projects and what work they are doing. Again, given the money involved we assume the numbers will exceed the FHBH average of 78% of all staff being local Indigenous people.
We will review the progress each month for the next 6 months here on the HH website.
The meeting’s follow up notes and proposed actions are included for your interest…..ask your state what is being done.
Final FHBH Stakeholder Meeting Notes from FaHCSIA
Where to from here?
Following the presentations of the day the forum came to a close with a preliminary discussion about what next / where to from here with these traditional FHBH Stakeholder meetings. The following comments were shared:
• What role could the Commonwealth play? Facilitator?
• Could FaHCSIA drive a national agenda?
• Is there a role for the JSCs?
• If jurisdictions were to come together, what would be the purpose of the forum? Could possibly choose a couple of key issues such as stoves, taps, doors, cooling, yard work to share learnings across States?
• In reference to the NPA, what is the Commonwealth asking the States to deliver? – should the request for measurable go beyond numbers?
• Opportunity for collective learning is jurisdictions continued to meet regularly – jurisdictions could share hosting these?
• Reviewing State housing standards could be explored
• Opportunity to involve regional staff
• What is the future role of Healthabitat in this space? – Need to be clear that Healthabitat has passed on all their learnings within every product in the hands of jurisdictions to choose to implementation.
• Coming together could have a policy focus eg links between home cooling and elderly health / dv reduced – papers could be shared about how each jurisdiction is responding tho their respective social issues
ACTION – Jurisdictions in the coming weeks to discuss within their Departments and advise FaHCSIA if they would like to trial a flow on from these FHBH meetings and what it would look like.
