Key Factors Influencing Service Delivery

Key Components of Service Delivery
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Key Components of Service Delivery
Human services play a significant role in society of serving individuals in a community. The concept of human services is broadly defined as the unique approach to meeting human needs by preventing and remediating societal problems. Halley et al. (2007) expand this definition to include the efforts or commitments to uplift the general quality of life of a particular population. Human service delivery entails the provision of empowering services to a society identified to require the services. Service delivery focuses on the quality of direct services and aims to improve aspects such as accessibility and coordination of the agencies and professionals involved in human service delivery. Human service delivery is a systematic process the entails key components. The process is guided by referrals, advocacy, brokering, mobilization, leadership, and organizational structure, whose details will be analyzed in the following discourse.
Identification of Community Resources and Referrals
Identification of community resources plays a significant role in human service delivery. As Halley et al. (2007) assert, many human service workers analyze communities in terms of society's needs and deficits. This strategy is effective since each community is characterized by needs and deficits that require attention. The thinking and process of identifying community resources may differ from one human service worker to another. Some may opt to focus on society's deficits and needs, while others focus on society's strengths and assets. Thomas et al. (2010) advocate for concentrating on society's positives and identifying available resources instead of unavailable resources. This approach seeks to improve existing resources. Using this approach, a community asset or resource is defined as anything that can improve life in a society. Examples include people, physical structures such as schools and hospitals, and business entities contributing to the local economy. Using surveys, qualitative studies, and public records, human service workers can easily identify community resources.
Collaboration is the cornerstone of human services workers' referrals. No single human service worker can exhaustively meet all the needs of society. When many workers that provide services to a community work independently, the result is a fragmented service delivery that does not address community needs holistically. A community-collaborative model is the best service delivery model adopted by many human service workers. According to Thomas et al. (2010), any collaborative network's major challenge is diverse agencies employing different assessment tools in collecting similar information. The use of referrals helps in dealing with this challenge. Once a human service agency in a collaborative network identifies a community need, it makes referrals to other agencies in the network best suited to deal with the identified need. Using this strategy, it becomes unnecessary for other agencies to get involved in using a different tool to identify the same need. Collaboration between different agencies also plays a vital role in helping human service workers to r...