Interdisciplinary child protection team work in a hospital setting

Abstract

Although the work of CPT can be considered to be effective and useful, better diagnostic selectivity and specificity and a long-term follow-up are required.

Characteristics associated with maltreatment types in children referred to a hospital protection team

“…As other studies suggest [14,34], physical maltreatment is a common phenomenon referred to the CPT at University Children's Hospital Zürich. However, this CPT handles even more sexually maltreated children and adolescents.…”

“…Although CPTs have been established for quite a while in different places and states, only few articles are published that report data of CPT cases in hospitals [3, 13, 15, 16, 20, 21, 26-28, 33, 35], and just two of them are from Europe [8,34]. The available data differ in various aspects, making it difficult to compare or generalize.…”

“…First, CPTs differ considerably in their definitions of maltreatment [15,20,26,33], and second, they often focus on specific types of maltreatment, mainly sexual [13,16,21,27] or physical [8], sometimes combined with a focus on specific age groups [28]. Finally, comparability of data is complicated by the fact that some studies focus on interventions, diagnoses, or perpetrators [3,15,34,35] and describe only few comparable demographics of their sample. Therefore, the findings to date are more or less exploratory.…”

“…For the city of Zürich sub-sample, child's nationality and socioeconomic status were introduced as further independent variables. Regarding the prominent role of physical maltreatment in hospital settings [14,20,25,26,33,34], it is set as base outcome for the regressions, and other categories are compared to it. To take differences between the categories of certainty and the reporting channels into account, these variables are included as controls in the statistical analyses.…”

“…Not surprisingly, the most prominent type of maltreatment reported to CPTs at hospitals in different parts of the world are violations of child's physical wellbeing [14,20,25,26,33,34], although definitions of this category differ from narrow to wide. No clear picture can be drawn regarding the distribution of gender and age within maltreatment sub-types except for sexual maltreatment, where more girls are reported than boys [16,20,26].…”