About the SHS Collection 

The Specialist Homelessness Services (SHS) Collection, managed by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), is a national dataset capturing administrative data on individuals seeking support from agencies funded under the National Agreement on Social Housing and Homelessness.  

Approximately 60% of specialist domestic and family violence (DFV) crisis services nationally use a client management system that reports data through to the SHS Collection 1. 

The AIHW reports on SHS data annually, including information about client support periods and the kinds of assistance that people are seeking, provided and referred on to from these services. However, the SHS Collection and reporting does not differentiate between specialist DFV services and other homelessness services – this is not a variable recorded within the collection, so the AIHW cannot filter data on this basis. Therefore, it is not currently possible to analyse and report on specialist DFV service data as a subset of the broader SHS Collection, or to distinguish between the experiences and needs of people accessing DFV services and those accessing homelessness services.  

SHS data request project 

Safety Measures is engaging with the AIHW to extract a subset of SHS data, based on a list of specialist DFV services in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Victoria, to help understand:​ 

• The proportion of people accessing DFV services for the first time and who have accessed these services previously, compared with proportions of new or repeat clients within the broader homelessness system​ 

• What kinds of assistance DFV service users require, are provided, or are referred to, compared with broader homelessness service users​ 

• Client demographics, trends or themes specific to specialist DFV service contexts, and how these might compare to homelessness services​ 

• How many people are accessing homelessness services due to experiencing domestic and family violence, but are not provided or referred to a specialist DFV support service​. 

The data will be de-identified and provided at an aggregate level – in tables grouped by jurisdiction. We won’t have access to any data at the organisation, service/program, or client level.  

Sector participation 

To enable this data extraction, Safety Measures needs to provide the AIHW with a list of participating service providers, including their unique numeric identifiers within the database. These identifiers are usually referred to as SHS Agency IDs, and most organisations have multiple IDs, depending on the programs or services they deliver.  

We are asking organisations to provide their SHS Agency IDs for dedicated DFV victim survivor programs and services – that is, all programs and services you deliver specifically to adults and children who have experienced domestic or family violence. 

Providing your SHS agency IDs will enable accurate and targeted data extraction and help to ensure specialist DFV service data is separated from other reported data, for example where an organisation reports to the SHS on a range of other programs and services. 

Only services that confirm their participation and provide us with their SHS Agency IDs will be included in the data request to AIHW. 

Please note: While providing your SHS agency ID confirms your service’s participation in the data request, this will not give us access to your service’s data. At this stage, we are seeking SHS Agency IDs to be included in the data request, which will later undergo data governance and ethics review by AIHW to determine whether they can release the data to us. 

What will Safety Measures do with the data? 

Once the data is received, Safety Measures will: 

• Analyse the tables to identify patterns, gaps, and limitations 

• Facilitate workshops with participating services to interpret and make sense of the data 

• Explore alternative data collection methods to fill gaps 

• Share insights and findings with the sector and policy makers. 

Safety Measures is an initiative by and for the specialist DFV sector, and this data request is a collaboration. We will share the aggregate data with service providers that opt in to be part of the project, and will invite you to be part of collective analysis, interpretation and sense-making processes that will help shape advocacy efforts and inform future data collection approaches. 

Next steps 

Safety Measures is currently reaching out directly to in-scope services to confirm participation and collate SHS Agency IDs. 

If we don’t hear back from you, we’ll follow up to find out if your services should be included and if we can do anything to support your engagement. 

We’re aiming to submit the data request to AIHW by January 2026, and will keep all participating services updated about its progress.