Access to Services (ATS) is a trial, attached to the Gateway Assessment system (Gateway), to better address the identified needs of tamariki and rangatahi in care, or at risk of coming into care. ATS introduces an ‘enhanced’ brokerage role by a specialist Service Lead and provides additional funding to enable direct purchasing of services where business as usual (BAU) public funding streams are exhausted or not available in a timely way.

ATS started with a demonstration phase (December 2016 to September 2017) and then a trial phase (October 2017 to April 2019), and was conducted in the Waitematā and Bay of Plenty District Health Board (DHB) areas. A process evaluation was conducted to inform on-going development of ATS and future evaluation design. The evaluation period was from 18 October 2017 to 22 May 2018, and included analysis of collected administrative data and qualitative focus group/interviews with professionals and key stakeholders.

The objectives of the evaluation are to provide Oranga Tamariki with a comprehensive understanding of the following aspects of the ATS trial in the Waitematā and Bay of Plenty (BOP) DHB areas: 1. How brokerage and direct purchasing is best implemented into the Gateway processes; 2. What the expected outcomes for tamariki and rangatahi from ATS should be; 3. What the strengths and challenges are for implementing ATS into the Gateway processes, and how to improve/rollout the implementation; 4. Recommendations for further evaluation of ATS. (From the Executive summary). Record #6120