How the Social Care System Coped and Adapted to COVID 19

Researchers from TeEACH were commissioned by Uniting to document the experiences of service organisations in disadvantaged communities in South West Sydney during the 2021 lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. We interviewed 27 workers, in 10 focus groups, to gather service provider perspectives on the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on families, service delivery agencies, and the system more broadly. Understanding the experience of street-level social care workers and managers is critical for understanding the lived reality of how this process actually occurred, what the stressors were, what was deliberately retained or abandoned, and what emergent features enabled or hindered responses. We found that: the COVID response was driven based on COVID being a medical emergency, which hid the extent of the psychosocial impact on people in South West Sydney; the public health response made a number of assumptions about how people in Sydney lived, and the resources to which they had access. These assumptions do not hold for large numbers of people in South West Sydney; there were barriers to service integration at the system level in the response to the impact of the pandemic; the impact on staff from trying to respond to the depth and volume of need was significant. We identified recommendations to strengthen the service system