Personal Approaches to Treatment among Staff in Residential Care

• Summary: Working in residential group care is a complex task. There is a wide gap between principles and guidelines and daily practice. This qualitative case study in a home for the long-term care and treatment of young persons in Sweden is an attempt to explore and systematize careworkers' ideas about the treatment of individual young persons. The aims were to examine personal approaches to treatment and to explore the consistency and individualization in the perceptions of the treatment of each young person. Each careworker was interviewed about each young person in two different occasions. Statements were coded and grouped into categories. • Findings: It was possible to find a model in which careworkers' treatment perceptions could be studied and compared. Each careworker had a unique and stable pattern of treatment perceptions. These perceptions of treatment were however consistent enough to create different patterns in the cases of different young persons, that is, the perception of treatment was individualized. • Applications : A well-functioning system or model of treatment ideas may be a means to enhance the quality of residential care on the assumption that the system or model is close to the real world of careworkers. It could also be means for defining treatment components and measuring treatment fidelity.