Enhancing family and relationship service accessibility and delivery to culturally and linguistically diverse families in Australia

• Pooja Sawrikar, Ilan Katz
• Australian Family Relationships Clearinghouse

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04 June 2008Family relationship services span a diverse and extensive range of interventions that aim to support and nurture family relationships, and so provide an important source of support to families in Australia. However, there is a dearth of research and information on service accessibility and the effectiveness of interventions in the family relationship services sector across different cultural groups in Australia.

This paper builds on and synthesises the emerging international and national literature to develop a practice and policy framework that can be used to help overcome inequities in access to or culturally inappropriate service delivery of family relationship services for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) families in Australia.

Broadly, there are two main aims of this paper. The first is to identify the key issues, challenges and needs of CALD families when accessing and using family relationship services, as well as the key issues, challenges and needs of service providers and practitioners when they deliver services to CALD clients. Secondly, this paper aims to use the identified concerns of CALD families and service providers and practitioners to make practice, procedure and policy recommendations. These recommendations can be used to increase the inclusion and engagement of CALD families in the family relationship services sector.