Professionals involved in creating future social policy and commissioning services need to respond to young people's priorities and adapt to the patient's developing sexuality and the changing demographics of young people with HIV.
Globally, children have been profoundly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in many ways. While the majority of children with acute Covid-19 infection experience mild illness and fully recover, many go on to experience Long Covid. Long Covid is clinically identified by experience of persistent (and sometimes different) symptoms for several months after the acute infection (even in children who were asymptomatic). There is currently no agreed consensus on the case definition of Long Covid, but real-world data from American health insurance firms and the UK Office for National Statistics report that children may experience intestinal symptoms, pain, breathlessness, cognitive dysfunction and post-exercise malaise. The current understanding of the natural history, diagnostics and treatments of Long Covid is limited, meaning the medical model in isolation is not helpful. Health visitors and school nurses are ideally placed to case-find children with Long Covid and co-produce child and family-centred care.
Without a doubt, the pressure that front-line practitioners work under to ensure they accurately assess and balance the need for professional intervention when confronted with presenting complexity of children's lives is extremely stressful (Kettle, 2018). The complexity of child protection work often requires significant professional judgement to be drawn upon to make safe and sensitive decisions, most often through the use of discretion, intuition, and analytical thinking (Nyathi, 2019). Since the Seebohm Report (1968) in the United Kingdom (UK), a increasing demand for audit-centricity in safeguarding practice has premised for clearly documented decision-making processes including the written descriptions of professional judgement but this is far from simplistic in practice (Broadhurst et al., 2010). Since the 1980s, Taylor and White ( 2001) have noted the fine dynamism between knowledge, truth, and reflexivity in social work professional judgements, remarking that the nature of safeguarding assessment is as much a practical-moral activity as it is a technical-rational one, especially on the common basis of incomplete, inconclusive and contested information (Helm, 2016). Taylor and White's observations of this dynamism remains a contemporary issue in safeguarding practice, yet we can extend this dynamic issue to all front-line practice, especially as newer forms of child maltreatment become recognised as social and legal problems (e.g. County Lines).Whilst professional judgement is almost an exclusive qualitative exercise in safeguarding practice, it can be, if available, supported by risk-based consensus, actuarial and structured assessments, tools, and instruments to 'evidence' a threshold decision (De Bortoli et al., 2017). The use of assessments/tools/instruments offers front-line practitioners a way of describing a practical-moral situation in a technical-rational framework, however, their use is only as effective as the practitioner's knowledge on using it, e.g. vigilance for optimising assessment/tool/instrument conditions that maintains equity, validity and reliability (De Bortoli et al., 2017). The use, meanings, and consistency and, to be more precise, equity, validity, and reliability of vocabulary in assessments/tools/instruments for safeguarding practice is under-researched.
Conceptualisations and contextualisations of what is considered 'child abuse' continue to evolve and consequently child protection systems vary across regions, countries and continents. How errors and mistakes in child protection are perceived gives rise to consequential politico-administrative developments through an organisation or the orientation of legal, criminal, decriminalising and policy frameworks, or, in some cases, inaction. This book illustrates transnational perspectives on errors and mistakes in child protection from 11 Western countries including across Europe and the USA. The first two chapters provide an introduction and conceptual framework on errors and mistakes in child protection by illuminating key epistemic transformations in the 'modern' realisation of, what is now considered, child abuse since the 1960s. Errors and mistakes are two key concepts that are broadly understood as being characterised by the array of Western child protection systems and socio-politico-administrative reactions. Errors and mistakes are, indeed, sensitive and difficult issues to deal with; the editors accept that a universally agreeable definition of both concepts is not a practical possibility. The following 11 chapters offer country-specific examples, demonstrating a diversity of discourses, approaches and strategies on errors and mistakes including trajectories of specific events. The last chapter identifies the key similarities and differences between the countries examined. The editors agree loosely that errors can be defined as the deviation from legal and/or professional care/standards/duties, while mistakes can be defined as actions or inactions based on misconceptions, misunderstandings or misbeliefs. The editors conclude that errors and mistakes in child protection are multifaceted and that a transnational perspective can illuminate the need to view such errors and mistakes as a cross-system issue. This book has been entrepreneurial in using existing research and knowledge to inform the global child protection community of the varying system designs and responses to system failure. This innovative book facilitates a refreshing approach to the advancement of a global commitment to keep children safer from harm, through collective understanding, learning and, indeed, action. This book is highly recommended for practitioners, managers, policymakers and researchers who are interested in child protection system design and strategy, with a focus on holistic risk strategy or reduction rather than narrow risk aversion.
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