• Baptist Community Services

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Report cover: Needs of residents in unlicensed boarding houses

01 August 2011This report highlights the range of unmet needs experienced by residents in unlicensed boarding houses in the Sydney and Illawarra regions.

Boarding house residents have identified a lack of social relationships, meaningful activities and mental health issues as areas of significant unmet needs.

Further, unfulfilled basic needs including access to food, appropriate accommodation and health care limits residents’ capacity to engage and make decisions in everyday life and adds to the vulnerability which they face.

• The majority of boarding house residents experience high psychological distress.
• Almost one-third had problems with mental health issues and alcohol at the same time.
• Residents had few meaningful activities to engage in and limited existing social networks or capacity to create one.
• There is often limited opportunity to cook, store or eat food in a boarding house environment and residents reported little choice in ways to access food.
• Many residents experienced poor physical health and many of prescribed medication.

Residents also endure substandard living conditions and limited privacy, security or safety. Residents reported tension and arguments at the boarding house with many finding that they were unable to approach their boarding house manager. In addition to the uncertainty of their tenure at the boarding house, these living conditions can compound the disadvantage residents face.

Further, residents’ unmet needs were often interlinked, which can exacerbate the extent of their need in a particular domain. For example residents with high psychological distress were more likely to have unmet needs in the area of social relationships. Residents with unmet needs for food were more likely to have unmet needs in the domain of daily activities. In addition, more than a third of residents had needs in three or more domains. These results emphasise the complexity of residents’ unmet needs over a range of life domains.