What does it really take to make systems work together when all their momentum is behind working separately?
In this post, Health Justice Australia’s CEO, Lottie Turner, talks about ecosystems of care and the need for deliberate focus on aligning systems for partnership.
I’ve spent the best part of 20 years working at the boundaries between systems and thinking about what it takes to help them work better together.
And it’s a question that’s surfaced repeatedly in recent conversations with government, funders, researchers, service leaders and practitioners. Whether the focus is family and domestic violence, child and family wellbeing, mental health or any number of other reform agendas, a common theme cuts across all of them: fragmentation remains, and there’s still more to do in bridging those gaps.
This isn’t a particularly controversial idea anymore. Most people I’ve spoken with would agree that if we’re serious about improving outcomes, particularly for people experiencing complex challenges, systems need to be better connected.
Collaboration and integration are now routine features in our major reform agendas. We recognise that people don’t experience their lives in silos. Health, housing, safety, justice, education and community connection interact in powerful ways. The challenges people face, and the solutions they need, rarely sit neatly within the boundaries of a single service system.
And yet, after all these years, I still find myself coming back to the same question.
If we agree that systems need to work together, do we have what we need to make that happen?
Too often, we treat collaboration as though it’s something that’ll naturally emerge once we name it in a framework or policy, or when we ask for it to be funded. Yet almost every major reform agenda now depends upon it. And this is where I think we need to pay closer attention.
We’ve become very good at describing why collaboration matters. I’m not sure we’ve become as good at describing what collaboration requires. The thing I’ve learned is that collaboration isn’t the by-product of good intentions. It’s work in and of itself.
Anyone who has tried to build a partnership across systems knows this. Trust, shared understanding, working out who does what, what gets shared, what gets measured and who’s accountable – it all takes time.
This is where the idea of ecosystems of care starts to resonate for me.
I’m no ecologist, but one thing I find compelling about the ecosystems metaphor is that healthy ecosystems don’t emerge because one part works harder than the rest. They thrive because relationships, interdependencies and diversity are actively maintained. Each part of the system plays a different role, but together they create the conditions for the whole ecosystem to flourish.
When we think about challenges such as family and domestic violence, suicide, child wellbeing or mental ill-health, the question is not whether individual organisations are working hard enough. In many cases, they are already doing extraordinary work.
The challenge is that they’re often doing so in parallel. In some cases, due to competitive funding environments, they’re doing so in competition.
Now, I’m not in any way suggesting people aren’t trying. When I look across the various national reforms currently underway, they’re often concerned with the same children, the same families and the same communities. They’re just approaching them from different vantage points.
The opportunity is not simply to mobilise these systems. Most are already mobilised.
The opportunity is to better align them. And the work of alignment doesn’t happen by accident.
For me, alignment starts to raise a different set of questions. What sits between our vision and implementation? What gets in the way of, and on the flip side, what helps people work across professional boundaries? What needs to happen to build our literacy about how power shows up, moves, or stays stuck between people and systems? What supports trust, shared learning, accountability and collective action over time?
At Health Justice Australia, this is increasingly where we see our greatest opportunity to contribute.
We see a role in helping create the conditions that allow systems to work together more effectively. That might mean building workforce capability. It might mean translating evidence into practical tools and resources. It might mean helping partners identify what can be adapted and applied across different contexts. It might mean convening conversations that bring together perspectives that wouldn’t otherwise meet.
Whatever form it takes, the goal is the same: supporting more connected responses to the complex and intersecting challenges people experience in their everyday lives.
And there’s a good news story to be told here. We’re seeing growing recognition of the need for this work.
Across policy, practice and research, there’s increasing acknowledgement that integration and collaboration matter and that no single organisation or sector can solve these challenges alone.
The next question is whether we’re prepared to invest in what collaboration actually requires.
Because if we’re serious about creating more integrated responses to complex social challenges, perhaps the conversation is no longer whether collaboration matters.
Perhaps the conversation is whether we’re willing to invest in what it actually takes.
