The proxy indicator does not cover all homeless people but only those that are supported at a SAAP agency and are assessed as having housing/accommodation needs by a SAAP agency worker. Homeless people who do not receive support from SAAP agencies and SAAP clients who are not identified as having housing/accommodation needs are not in scope for the proxy indicator. The proxy indicator has been estimated from the SAAP NDC and has the same scope as the SAAP Client Collection. In the SAAP Client Collection, data are collected by support providers for each client support period. An individual client may receive support on more than one occasion – either from the same SAAP agency or from different SAAP agencies. The scope of the proxy indicator is all people who were either SAAP clients or children accompanying SAAP clients, who were identified by the SAAP agency worker as having housing/accommodation needs during the 2007-08 financial year, where: A SAAP client is a person who is homeless or at imminent risk of homelessness who:
• is accommodated by a SAAP agency; or • enters into an ongoing support relationship with a SAAP agency; or • receives support or assistance from a SAAP agency which entails generally 1 hour or more of a worker’s time, either with that client directly or on behalf of that client, on a given day. This includes people who are aged 18 years or older and people of any age not accompanied by a parent or guardian. An accompanying child is a person aged under 18 years who: • has a parent or guardian who is a SAAP client; and • accompanies that client to a SAAP agency any time during that client’s support period; and/or • receives assistance directly as a consequence of a parent or guardian’s support period. People can be considered as SAAP clients for a particular financial year reporting period when: • the client’s support period ended in the reporting period, or • the client’s support period started on or before the end of the reporting period and either was ongoing at the end of the reporting period (30 June) or the end date of the support period was unknown and the record was entered by the NDCA before the data entry close-off date for the reporting period. Under SAAP, people are considered homeless when they do not have access to safe and secure housing. This definition of homelessness can be considered broader in scope than the cultural definition of homelessness used in other NAHA homelessness Performance Indicators (PIs) as the cultural definition only covers people who do not have access to housing above or equal to the minimum community standard of a small rental flat with a bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom and some security of tenure. The financial year was chosen as a standard time frame for the proxy indicator as this is in line with the SAAP reporting period and repeat periods of homelessness must be measured over a period of time. By only counting homeless people within a financial year, persons who had multiple periods of homelessness spanning across different financial years may fall out of scope for the proxy indicator. Multiple periods of SAAP support can be provided which could relate to just a single period of homelessness. This can happen for example when a SAAP client receives support and then seeks additional support for the same period of homelessness over the following days. A SAAP client’s support period is assumed to relate to a different period of homelessness when there is a gap of 6 weeks or more between support periods for which housing/accommodation needs have been identified. A gap of 6 weeks has been determined to provide a reasonable balance between identifying support periods which relate to different periods of homelessness and extending the minimum gap required for identifying distinct support periods. If the minimum gap between distinct support periods is extended too far this leads to more support periods crossing into the following financial year and potentially falling out of scope for the proxy indicator. |