The Victorian Government has committed to implementing all 227 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Family Violence and to delivering on the vision described in Roadmap for Reform: strong families, safe children. A key recommendation of the Royal Commission, and a reform direction of the Roadmap for Reform, was to establish a network of Support and Safety Hubs, now known as The Orange Door, across Victoria. Website: www.rcfv.com.au
The Orange Door provides a new way for women, children and young people who are at risk of experiencing or have experienced family violence; and families in need of support with the care or wellbeing of children and young people to access coordinated support.
The Orange Door is a key part of the ongoing reform of the family violence and the children and families service systems. These reforms aim to strengthen responses for victim survivors of family violence and create better outcomes for children and families, while also addressing perpetrator behaviour, and improving access to interventions that support behaviour change.
The Orange Door is not the only way to access services and support. It does not replace existing specialist services providing case management, support and accommodation responses but it does enable a new streamlined entry point.
The significant work undertaken across Government and the community sector, specifically our partner agencies, to build networks of safety and to connect services has been key to the successful implementation of The Orange Door.
There has been an enormous commitment and effort by The Orange Door workforce and core partner agencies in coming together to deliver the new service model. The first year of implementation also represents a significant journey in practitioners’ uptake of new systems, tools and practice. Some of their experiences and case studies have been shared in this report.
An independent evaluation of The Orange Door was completed in 2019. The evaluation focused on the establishment and initial operations of The Orange Door in the first four Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) areas where it has been established with the aim of identifying key learnings and opportunities for improvement.
Sharing experiences and data from the first year of service delivery
This Annual Report uses service provision data to tell the story of how The Orange Door supported people in the 2018-19 financial year.
Information and data have been primarily collected from Family Safety Victoria’s Client Relationship Management (CRM) system. The CRM system used by The Orange Door is new and evolving and is currently only able to report on some elements of service provision and how The Orange Door is supporting people. The CRM data has been supplemented by other manual data collection in 2018-19.
As data collection and reporting processes improve, a more robust data set will be available for analysis and interpretation, including a clearer picture of people’s journey through The Orange Door and access the services they need to be safe and supported.
The data is broken down by quarters: Quarter one (July – September 2018), Quarter two (October – December 2018), Quarter three (January – March 2019), and Quarter four (April – June 2019). Throughout the report these may be referred to as Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4.
Updated