Search

This article examines Norway's child welfare service managers' perceptions of infection control measures on service functionality. The longitudinal study entailed nine rounds of surveys (N = 153–214) with child welfare managers between April 2020 and September 2021, collected by the Norwegian Directorate for Children Youth and Family Affairs after the onset of the Norwegian lockdown of March 2020. The findings suggest links between the strictness of measures and ability of child welfare services to ensure appropriate service delivery. Lockdown caused significant difficulties for many municipalities, while milder measures had less impact. We discuss some implications for practice with children and families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian child protection system is struggling to successfully address voluminous child protection notifications, increasing numbers of children in state care, decreasing foster-carers and chronic workforce issues. In this paper, we argue that the capacity of statutory child protection agencies to achieve their social policy objectives is severely hampered by their failure to acknowledge or challenge the competing ideologies that underpin contemporary child protection practices. This failure means that the individuals who work in this area experience contradictory demands that compromise their capacity to work effectively and often render their work conditions intolerable, amidst the ongoing threat of media criticism that they are failing. Meanwhile, children and families in need experience risk assessment and interventions often reported to be debilitating and traumatising. This paper highlights many of the problems experienced by people working in and for child protection services in Australia and advocates for urgent reform. To build more sustainable and high-quality child protection services, we argue, workforce development must be central to institutional and organisational reform. In order to achieve necessary change, improve workforce retention and the quality of work, we posit that workforce development strategies must include the reconceptualisation of underpinning ideologies and current approaches practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unacceptably high staff turnover has plagued traditional approaches to child protection, seemingly forever. Around the globe, numerous studies, reports and inquiries have highlighted how statutory agencies, focusing on risk-oriented investigations of suspected maltreatment, experience significant issues with worker stress and its occupational and organisational consequences. Yet, promoting staff resilience within child protection agencies' workforces has proved to be quite elusive at a systems level. While concern about child protection services often centers on the children and families agencies they intend to assist, the experiences of workers within the system provide further evidence that the system is itself failing. As a result, governments around the world are increasingly embracing system reforms that promote public health approaches focusing on early intervention and prevention to build child, family and neighbourhood support capacity and resilience and thereby reduce child maltreatment. We review the workforce issues affecting traditional child protection approaches and its impacts. In light of this, we examine the knowledge to be applied in the development of public health approaches that embrace integrated and coordinated systems of community care. Such reforms, with altered organisational remits that are far broader than narrow tertiary responses of investigation and removal, utilize evidence-based interventions targeted at differentiated risk and service user needs to provide effective supports and reduce maltreatment. This article unpacks the strategies needed to build and properly prepare a re-tooled workforce capable of implementing a public health model of preventive interventions. Not applicable. Current public health reforms are examined through the lens of their potential impacts upon contemporary workforce issues. Focusing upon building a stable, resilient and appropriately skilled workforce for a public health model, we examine the implications for key stakeholders including workers, program and organisational leaders, educators, researchers, academics and community members, especially children and vulnerable families. Public health approaches to protecting children seek to provide effective supports and services in timely ways in order to prevent unnecessary statutory interventions, which affect those from cultural and poor communities disproportionately. But remodelling systems to embrace these approaches entails complex practice, program, policy and legislative changes, using evidence to intervene in ways that are primarily voluntary rather than coercive. In doing so they provide potential to recast the basis of the helping relationship to attend better to the relational aspects of changed behaviour. Embedding workforce resilience strategies in reformed systems is necessary to address retention and ensure service effectiveness and responsiveness to the diversity of needs of struggling families and impoverished communities. Thereby, public health approaches are well placed to achieve their true potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carers are at the frontline working with children in the care of the child protection system. This paper reports carer's views about key factors influencing the placement trajectories of children and young people living in out-of-home care in Queensland, Australia. The study sample included 21 foster and kinship carers with a minimum two-year experience in the carer role. Study data were from semi-structured telephone interviews in which carers shared their experiences of the factors impacting upon placement stability and placement movement. Carers' responses were analysed thematically. Data analysis yielded an overarching theme regarding placement trajectory: Carer engagement, and its three sub-themes; with the child; with the child protection system; and, with the caring role. Findings suggested that carer engagement and ‘fit’ are complex constructs that play critical influential roles in placement outcomes (stability or movement) for individual children in out-of-home care. It is argued that practice needs to be better grounded in these relational dynamics, and better aligned concerning the power differentials that exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]