Development of evidence based guidelines for out of home placement in the Netherlands
Cora Bartelink
Netherlands Youth Institute
Cora Bartelink is a researcher and advisor at Netherlands Youth Institute. The Netherlands Youth Institute is the Dutch national institute for compiling, verifying and disseminating knowledge on children and youth matters. Its main aim is to improve the development of children and young people by increasing the quality and effectiveness of the services rendered to them and their parents.
Cora is developing guidelines for professionals working in child welfare and child protection. Subjects of these guidelines are “Out-of-home placement”, “Out-of-home placement in crisis situations”, and “Deciding together with parents and children on appropriate help”. She also conducts research on decision-making on child maltreatment. Research methods include vignette study on reliability of decisions, retrospective case file study on transparency of decisions, and prospective validity study on risk assessment.
Abstract
Objectives: Out of home placement is a major occurrence in a child’s life. It can have positive and negative effects on a child’s development and should therefore always be based on careful decision making. At this ... [ view full abstract ]
Objectives: Out of home placement is a major occurrence in a child’s life. It can have positive and negative effects on a child’s development and should therefore always be based on careful decision making. At this moment evidence based guidelines for out of home placement that support the healthy development of children are being developed in the Netherlands. The guidelines should contribute to more evidence based knowledge of practitioners and to create more consensus on the process. The most important themes in the guideline – according to child welfare practitioners – are: decision-making on placement; interventions to prevent out of home placement and interventions to promote successful reunification.
Method: The EBRO method was used for evidencebased guideline development. The guideline development started with identification and analysis of bottlenecks in practice. Then a literature review was done. Because this review showed major scientific gaps, focus groups with practitioners (mainly behavioral scientists and social workers) were organized.
Results: In this presentation we would like to focus on the process of decision-making regarding out of home placement. For this, the English Framework for Assessment of Children in Need and their Families was a useful framework. In our process it was used to construct a structured decision-making model showing the most important considerations for the decision on out of home placement and reunification. Focus groups confirmed the relevance and usefulness of this model.
Conclusions: At this phase of the development of the guidelines, we have established the main elements that should be taken into considerations concerning out of home placement. This is as much as possible based on scientific evidence. However, much in the decision making process is still based on practicebased knowledge, experience and common sense of the practitioners. Further research should be done to validate the guidelines on out of home placement.
Authors
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Cora Bartelink
(Netherlands Youth Institute)
Topic Area
Training Professionals and Education of children and families
Session
Oral 8 » Session 2- Training Professionals (14:15 - Monday, 2nd October, Europe 1 Room)
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