Why is this useful for rural and remote people?

Public services such as health, housing, education, justice etc are delivered by different departments and agencies of government for administrative efficiency. This works really well in large cities where each agency or department delivers services in multiple proximate locations across the city. This model does not work in small towns because small populations often do not warrant the delivery of a full-time service, or the benefits of having a single staff member in an isolated office is considered to too low to warrant the cost of providing the service. An innovative approach to this problem for small rural and remote communities is the ‘community hub’ model. In a ‘community hub’ a range of public services are provided from a single location. For example, Service NSW uses an ‘administrative hub’ model to deliver everything from birth certificates, drivers licenses, insurance and other public services from a single convenient location in most communities in NSW. In rural areas, Service NSW hubs are contracted to local government and delivered from local council buildings allowing a wider range of locally relevant services to be accessible from one location, and to ensure staff have appropriate supervision and support. Community hubs use the same model, but focus on community services such as housing, employment, training, health, family and child support etc from a common location. By delivering these from a single location the government can share the cost of facilities, equipment and management across multiple agencies and departments reducing the cost of service delivery. An additional benefit of community hubs is that health and social services can work more closely together to improve outcomes for local people. For example, a co-located doctor and housing officer can work together to address the leak in a patient’s roof that is contributing to mould and respiratory disease. A co-located psychologist and school counsellor can develop strategies to improve access to behavioural support and mental health care for young people. In the context of primary care, it is well known that Medicare rebates are insufficient to cover the cost of delivering health care in rural and remote communities. By funding backend administration costs through hub agreements primary care can be more financially sustainable, improving access for rural people. The community hub model has been tried and tested in Australia, most notably the Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations are an example of how different departments, and different levels of government, can pool health and social funding to support a local community-led organisation to deliver services locally that government is unable to deliver efficiently or effectively itself. Community hubs have been established across Australia by local community members. This article is important for rural and remote people because it identifies the value of community hubs as a solution to the long-term problem of government service withdrawal from rural and remote towns, and what governments need to do to support this as a solution to the service needs of these communities.