“Suiting up”: Preparing workforces to take on the mantle of preventing child maltreatment from a public health perspective

Internationally, particularly in anglophone countries, there are increasing calls for a new vision for child welfare involving significant shifts in service delivery from a statutory intervention focus to systems based on public health approaches. The impetus for change includes the rapidly growing demand for services, chronic workforce challenges, systemic inequities, systemic failings, disproportionate representation of disadvantaged groups, and poor outcomes for many children subject to child protection intervention. Research suggests that public health approaches, focusing on primary prevention and population-wide delivery of interventions, are more likely to support the safety and wellbeing of children and families across the community, reducing the escalation of risk and the need for statutory intervention. Despite this, the preparation of the child welfare workforces across health and social care sectors required to implement public health approaches, and implications of current workforce shortfalls for such a transition has received little attention. Drawing on the findings from a child welfare workforce study in Australia (Russ et al., 2022), this paper considers the workforce challenges present in current neo-liberal child protection systems and looks to what is needed to engage families and communities, ‘suit up’ and equip workforces for preparing for system reform to shift the dial from risk-oriented responses to the prevention of child maltreatment across the entire community.