Approaches to assessment and intervention across four types of child and family welfare services

Professionals in many contexts confront situations where children have been harmed or are at risk of harm. These include health, mental health, disability, and education, as well as a complex array of child and family welfare services. This paper focuses on the perspectives of workers within four child and family welfare service types: statutory child protection, domestic violence, family support, and intensive family support. As part of a broader study on participatory decision-making, 21 practitioners from two sites in Queensland, Australia, discussed their assessment and proposed intervention in relation to a vignette description of a family situation involving chronic neglect, substance abuse and domestic violence. This discussion was conducted in the context of an in-depth interview with each practitioner. Practitioners from all service types identified this as a high-risk case, and generally nominated similar environmental, parent-related and child-related issues. Further, their proposed response comprised a constellation of actions incorporating assessment of harm to the children, engaging family support services, attending to the needs of parents, and building a relationship with the parents. This commonality is of particular interest, given the complexity of the child and family welfare sector and the different roles played by different organisations. Building on these findings, we consider implications for the development of sector-wide approaches to risk assessment and for training of child protection professionals across a range of agency types.