 |
| Professional child care in the field of social work |
Professional child care in the field of social work
Professional child care in the field of social work, have come
under intense scrutiny recently. Much of this scrutiny, concerns the way in
which partnership and inter agency work contributes to best practice in the
assessment of children, young people and families. This paper seeks to explore
the principles of collaborative work and highlight why it is necessary that
inter-agency work is successful and efficient in the field of social work. In
doing so, will provide examples and discuss current guidelines for partnership
work and strategies of new assessment practices to ensure its effectiveness.
The essay will also address common problems of inter agency and partnership work
and identify policies to guard against these potential issues.
The Department of Health (1998) in encouraging the use of
partnership, stressed that “joined up services” should be the hallmark of good
service delivery. The Audit Commission (1998) declares that for services to be
efficient and effective, there must be “mandatory partnership working”. At a
basic level, inter-agency and partnership are formal institutional terms
attributed to the practice of and need for different agencies and sectors to
“work together”. According to Whittington (2003), “partnership is a state of
relationship at organizational, group, professional or inter-personal level, to
be achieved, maintained and reviewed”, while “collaboration is an active
process of partnership in action.” It is within the umbrella term of
partnership, that terms such as ‘inter-agency’ and ‘multi-agency’ arise to pin
down the policies and concertize the practice of ‘joined-up’ work between
agencies.
The principles of collaborative working stipulate that there
should be seamless interaction between agencies to facilitate best practice and
ultimately improving care services. In a research of 30 multi agency organizations in health and education and over 140 staff, Atkinson ET AL (2002)
found the following necessary principles for inter-agency work:
- Common
aims and objectives
- Organizational
commitment to the aims and objectives
- Thorough
understanding of the various roles and responsibilities of other involved
professionals and agencies
- Solid
leadership
- Ensuring
task delegation and referrals are to the correct personnel
- Access
to resources
In addition, Whittington and Bell (2001) established that the
ability to work together effectively require many skills which are essential
for social workers, such as: the ability to challenge discrimination by other
agencies and professions, the ability to conduct multi-disciplinary meetings,
the ability to respect and manage issues of confidentiality, and being able to
handle conflicts and manage systems and human resource that will need to adapt
to change.
There are many policy directives which mandate partnership work
within services relating to child care and assessment, and one of these is the
2003 government green paper, Every Child Matters policy
document which stipulates the development of Children’s Trusts, to ensure that
agencies work effectively together to safeguard and promote the welfare of
children. Children’s Trusts emerged after the death of eight year-old Victoria
Climbié who even after repeated visits to hospitals and visits by social
workers, her abuse was not identified and she subsequently died. The Laming
Report of 2003, an inquiry into Victoria’s death concluded that the young
girl’s death could have been avoided if individual social workers, police
officers, doctors and nurses who came into contact with the girl, had
effectively responded to Victoria’s needs. He emphatically declared that
Victoria’s death represented a “gross failure of the system”, wherein, not one
of the agencies or individuals “had the presence of mind to follow what are
relatively straightforward procedures on how to respond to a child about whom
there is concern of deliberate harm”.
***********************
***********************
No comments: