Community Living groping in the dark

Social service organization may be underfunded, but needs to get its house in order

Digging deep, the audit focused on 149 of the highest- priority cases. Upon examination, 63 of the listings were found to be wanting in one respect or another, for an error rate of 42 per cent.

As a government- appointed team reviewed Community Living BC recently, it made a disparaging discovery about the agency’s widely cited list of adults with developmental disabilities who are needing services and not getting them.

The list is prepared by staff at Community Living in response to pleas from the developmentally disabled and their families for assistance that can range from improvements in existing services to full- blown residency in a group home.

The resulting request for services list, as it is known, is treated as the equivalent of a waiting list by CLBC’S supporters and critics alike.

News media report the contents as an index of the unmet needs of some of the province’s most unfortunate citizens. Critics point to it as evidence of the growing underfunding of key social services.

The government itself has used the list’s caseload as a starting point for calculating how much it would cost to eliminate the backlog at Community Living once and for all.

But when an audit team from the ministry of finance dug into the contents as part of the government review of Community Living, it found the supposedly authoritative list was riddled with errors: human, systemic and otherwise.

Some of the listings failed to note where requests had already been met. Others confused immediate needs ( a helping hand in the form of a care aide one or two days a week) with future ones ( aging parents who might some day not be able to look after their developmentally disabled child).

The audit team also found errors in recording significant aspects of a client’s actual circumstances, in the timelines used to report the duration since a request had been made, and in and the application of the point system used to assign priorities. Digging deep, the audit focused on 149 of the highest priority cases. Upon examination, 63 of the listings were found to be wanting in one respect or another, for an error rate of 42 per cent.

With that number in hand, the resulting audit, released Thursday along with two other reports on CLBC, proceeded to demolish the credibility of the request for services list. “Not an accurate tool for external reporting, forecasting, or budgeting purposes because much of the information is incorrect or has not been validated by community living staff,” it said.

This for a tally that occupies a central position in the running debate about the agency and its needs.

“While the list was never intended to be a waiting list, it is perceived as such by many stakeholders,” noted the report. “This has resulted in concerns that there is a large unmet demand for services.”

For instance, as of last fall, the list reported an outstanding caseload of almost 3,000 requests, 2,100 of them booked as seekers after additional services, another 800 recorded as receiving no services at all.

Those numbers were in turn the basis for the government’s rough estimate that it would cost as much as $ 65 million to eliminate the backlog at CLBC altogether.

But as the audit report underscored: “These numbers are likely overstated.” Indeed, extrapolating from the 40- per- cent error rate, as many as 1,200 of the listings might be mistaken as to the size and scope of the reputed need for services.

“The current state of the request for services list makes it impossible for Community Living to identify the unmet demand for its services or estimate the amount of funding required to fulfil all the service requests.”

Combine that finding with the other problems highlighted in the trio of reports released Thursday. Clients subjected to arbitrary cuts. Families kept in the dark about the full range of services available across government. ( Some of the most- in- need developmentally disabled adults can access upwards of $ 200,000 a year in one kind of service or another.)

You get the sense of an agency groping in the dark.

In terms of solutions, the auditors recommended that Community Living should “enhance its information system and business processes to provide more useful and reliable information to clearly identify current versus future service needs; distinguish between assessed needs and client/ family requests; and link service needs to funding requirements.”

Meaning, presumably, that the request for services list would be turned into what it is already perceived to be, namely a reliable index of needs that have not been met and what it would cost to meet them.

In the interim, the government acted on those and other concerns by announcing $ 40 million in additional funding for adults with developmental disabilities in the coming financial year. About half will go to CLBC for the existing caseload and backlog, and another $ 10 million is for “new approaches” to be shepherded by the parent ministry of social development. The rest will be parked in contingencies, for an anticipated growth in the caseload.

Whether that will be enough can’t be determined on any authoritative basis.

“Given the inherent problems in the request for services list, the true number of clients waiting for new and enhanced services is not known,” was the verdict from the internal audit.

And with all the fumbling on this file over the past year, the last thing anyone should want is for Community Living to be issued a blank cheque.