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The purpose of this paper is to report findings from a service evaluation undertaken within a single specialist child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) team. The team works closely with local authority children’s services to serve specific populations recognised as experiencing higher levels of mental health need, including children living in alternative care and with adoptive families. The evaluation sought to better understand the experience of this provision during the COVID-19 pandemic and concomitant increase in remote and digitally mediated care delivery.

Analysis of the accounts of 38 parents, carers and professionals involved with the team gathered via telephone interviews and email and postal questionnaires.

Similar views were expressed from participants involved with the team before and following the onset of the pandemic. Overall, satisfaction was high; however, changes in care appeared more challenging for those already involved with the team before the pandemic. Differences in experience between groups were also evident. Whereas foster carers’ accounts were generally appreciative of the involvement of clinicians, particularly regarding clinician–patient relationships, amongst adoptive parents and members of children’s birth families there were more mixed and negative impressions.

Locally based service evaluations can help inform care pathway planning in specialist CAMHS provision as part of wider quality improvement initiatives. This is especially relevant considering the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic and as the longer-term acceptability of remote working practices is appraised.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the experiences of carers caring for an adult child, particularly as they affect the transition from midlife into older age. It explores aspects affecting the vast majority of carers, such as accessing information and services, but focuses on the specific concerns of those caring for a child with a life-long disability or a child who acquires a long-term health problem in adolescence or adulthood. In the context of the introduction of the Care Act (2014) in England, the paper highlights ways in which support for carers could be improved.

This paper draws on interview data which consisted of 86 face-to-face interviews with purposefully selected participants based in four local authorities. At the end of the study in 2014 the authors held a series of five focus groups for practitioners and carers to explore how the emerging findings chimed with their experiences and to refine the study’s messages for practice. The data from interviews are set in the context of policy and practice developments in social care in England.

The paper draws attention to the need for practitioners to find ways of involving carers in decision making without compromising the rights to autonomy and choice on the part of the person cared for. Both those commissioning services and practitioners need to acknowledge that parent carers need assurances about the long-term viability and quality of the plans that are developed for the person they support.

This paper is drawn on interviews with carers and practitioners in four areas of England; most of the carers interviewed were white British and female. The implications of planning research and conducting research with family carers are explored and their similarities with practice encounters identified.

The key practice point in this paper highlights the necessity of talking about the future with parent carers, making plans for possible and highly likely events, addressing mortality, and being aware of the potential for a deeply held sense of pessimism and unspoken distress among carers. Some participants seemed to feel that practitioners conveyed a sense that they were inadequate or unwilling to discuss these matters and practitioners who suspect this may apply to them or their team could usefully consider seeking skills development to improve their practice.

This paper is the first to consider practice perspectives in the context of the Care Act (2014) and personal budgets in England relating to parent carers.

This study explored whether the creation of an illustrated picturebook could explain the terms and practicalities of participatory, multi-method qualitative research to children aged four to eight years and their parents/carers, creating conditions to seek agreement to their participation, by using an age-appropriate design whilst adhering to ethical guidelines. The purpose of this paper is to explore how this was done addressing these issues.

Drawing on the researcher's previous professional experience working in children's publishing and taking an innovative and collaborative approach to giving information to child and parent/carer co-researchers, the researcher and an illustrator created a picturebook both as an eBook and a paperback book to recruit and explain research and co-researchers’ roles to young children and their parents/carers.

The picturebook successfully recruited 30 children and their parents/carers. Other children expressed their wish not to participate. These findings suggest that greater consideration should be given to the ways information is given to potential research participants, particularly the visual, material and paratextual elements of the information sheets and consent forms routinely used in research.

This paper offers insight into the publishing practicalities of creating innovative ways of giving information about research participation to children and parents/carers and how these ways might foster rich data collection.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the eAdmissions National Project and provide some insights into a selection of the forms of research which have been conducted to inform the Project effectively.

Four different kinds of studies are described as examples of different themes being pursued towards developing a better understanding of parents'/carers' needs and providing information and guidelines to help local authorities achieve their objectives in relation to online school admissions.

The paper finds that the success of the work undertaken by the National Project is reflected in the increasing numbers of local authorities (LAs) that have already, or are in the process of, offering an online school admissions facility, as well as in the take‐up of this service by parents/carers within some of these authorities. Research undertaken by the Project has been key to this success and is now being directed towards the important issue of effecting significant take‐up of the online service by all local authorities that have responsibility for education. The outcomes from this research work have been applied to spread good practice, share information with all LAs and inform marketing campaigns. The effects of this research are beginning to be evidenced in the growing take‐up of online admissions.

While some of the research undertaken is specific to the requirements of the eAdmissions National Project, some of the approaches developed and data gathered may be applicable to projects of a similar nature where online services need to be made available to and taken up by particular sectors of the public.

This paper provides a source of information to interested parties on the aims and early achievements of the eAdmissions National Project. Further and more detailed information can be found at www.eadmissions.org

Special guardianship order (SGO) assessments require social workers to make plans and recommendations for ongoing post-SGO contact between the child and the parents. However, there is very little policy to inform and guide practitioners on how these duties should be undertaken, and no studies that describe current practice. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the recommending of contact in special guardianship cases is currently working, by holding focus groups with social workers and special guardians. This paper reports on the results of a study to examine what contact plans social workers are recommending, the thinking behind their decisions and the views of the special guardians who have to make those plans work.

The research involved a mixed methods approach comprising of an online questionnaire, two focus groups for social workers and two focus groups for special guardians. This paper describes the second part of the study and reports on the qualitative results from the four focus groups. The methodology was based on a pragmatist theoretical position, and used an interpretivist approach and elements of the analytical procedure of grounded theory in order to generate inductive research. The focus group method was chosen as the best way to gather rich information on the opinions and ideas of practitioners who are recommending contact and the carers who are managing it.

Participants provided a wide range of views on the issues, with practitioners describing the challenges of planning contact, and special guardians explaining the problems they faced with the parents. Involving special guardians in the study gave a chance to include the different perspectives of the people who have to make the contact recommendations work, and contrast their views on contact planning with those of the professionals. The study makes recommendations for practice, which recognise the difficulty of preparing an initial contact plan that will remain relevant for years ahead.

The number of focus groups the author held was limited by the author’s own personal resources and the time the author had available, and one group only had three social workers on the day. The author’s involvement affected the responses, and the author’s questions dictated the issues that were commented on, but the answers were the opinions that the participants wanted to express. The nature of the approach means that no two sets of focus group results would ever be the same. And as the direction of the discussions was largely dictated by the participants, the coverage of all aspects of contact was probably inconsistent.

This research sheds light on a crucial area of social work permanency planning, that has suffered from a lack of previous research, in order to better inform future practice. The paper reports on what contact plans social workers are recommending, the thinking behind their decisions and the views of the special guardians who have to make those plans work. It concludes with recommendations for improving future special guardianship policy and practice.

The research clearly raises a number of specific difficulties faced by special guardians and problems with current policy and practice. These include the special guardians’ lack of understanding about contact, the difficulty for social workers of long-term planning, the challenge posed by uncooperative parents who behave badly, the view of carers for the need for a greater emphasis on the quality and reliability of contact, and the challenge to careful contact planning posed by the adversarial court process.

Special guardianship has had a major impact on permanency planning since its introduction 12 years ago. However, apart from one DfE study in 2014, very little research has been produced to inform policy and practice. There have been no studies specifically on contact in special guardianship cases, despite contact being one of the two major factors in determining the success of SGO placements. This study has provided the first in-depth evaluation of social worker contact planning in special guardianship, and the first investigation of special guardians’ views on contact.

This paper reports research findings on the experiences of parents/carers of children with special education needs and disabilities who present violent and challenging behaviour. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore how parents/carers report how their support needs are met by social care services.

The research is an empirical study which considers the challenging side of parenting children with additional needs. Data were gathered through a national online social media focus group and thematically analysed to identify emerging themes from an overlooked community. The study applied a participatory approach, with researchers and participants collaborating in designing and producing the research.

Participants reported a multitude of adversities and they experience difficulties in accessing support from professionals. The parents and carers expressed a continued desire to care for their children, often during much adversity and in receipt of little recognition or support from external agencies. An emerging theme was that they are often not assessed in their own right by agencies who focus on safeguarding.

In this online participatory study, participants were self-selecting and the research relied on self-report during online discussions.

This study is original in applying an innovative research methodology using online focus groups with an under researched community. This online focus group generated real time data and offered participants the opportunity to share information in their own environments. The themes emerging from this research have implications for policy and practice for an under reported adult community who experience increasing vulnerabilities.

Effective transitions from child and adolescent to adult services are important for continuity of care for patients with eating disorders. This study aims to examine the relative importance of a series of statements about the transition process, elicited from an earlier service evaluation, from the perspectives of patients, parents/carers and clinicians.

Twenty-eight participants completed a Q-sort task ranking 40 statements, developed from an earlier study, using a normal distribution pattern on a scale, which ranged from strongly agree to strongly disagree, to identify their priorities for transition. Analysis resulted in the extraction of four factors explaining 52% of the variance.

Four distinct factors were elicited: “parents and carers need including too”, “facilitating effective transfer between services”, “supporting the patient through transition” and providing “timely, patient-centred care”. The study enabled similarities and differences in priorities to be observed for the three respondent groups.

These rankings, noting the differences between the respondent groups, can be used to inform the development of effective transition protocols. This study suggests these protocols should ensure a person-centred approach; timely planning; include parents/carers; provide continuous care and have good transfer of information and sensible timing of transitions. Differences in priorities/opinions can be addressed through open communication channels.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first UK-wide study examining priorities for transition from the perspectives of patients, parents/carers and clinicians.

In the era of evolving National Health Service with its visions for the future planned, the concept of “informed patient” has never been so important. Effective information provision is a prerequisite for partnership among child patients, their parents and health professionals. The purpose of this study is to determine the need for a Child and Family Information Centre outreach terminal in the waiting area of the Accident & Emergency (A&E) department for parents/carers who would like information about their child's medical condition.

This was a prospective study, which was conducted in a paediatric A&E department. It included 184 patients over six weeks' duration.

A total of 91 per cent of parents requested information. Young mothers were the group most interested in access to information. Most respondents in the A&E setting admitted that they would be unlikely to use a terminal in the A&E department but would complete enquiry forms to request postal information.

The offer of enquiry forms to the parents/carers at consultation would therefore be a viable option but it would probably be inappropriate utilisation of the resources to establish a terminal. Parents are happy to receive information if it is free and sent by post.

This paper seeks to reconcile society's need to apply strong sanctions to parents who are responsible for the murder of a disabled adult while also recognising the stresses present in their lives.

The paper reviews six cases in which seven disabled adults were killed by a parent in the UK between 1999 and 2009.

The review found that these were no ordinary crimes and nor were they motivated by malice, but occurred against a backdrop of significant mental illness and distress. In addition, two of the parents killed themselves as well as their adult child and another attempted suicide. The explanations offered in court to account for the murders included a combination of caregiver stress and mercy killing and the courts struggled to find a consistent approach.

The review is limited to cases reported in the press and only considers information in the public domain. The portrayal of the issues in the media is integral to the study. The cases reported in this paper are a sub‐set of a larger sample of children and adults murdered by caregivers during this period.

The paper compares and contrasts some features of these high‐profile cases, commenting on the way they were addressed in the courts and making recommendations as to how the backdrop of significant mental ill‐health could be taken into account in the way families are offered support with a view to preventing further tragedies.