Opening remark: Registration as a professional child and youth care worker by and with the South African Council for Social Service Professions ( SACSSP) is a legal process established to protect the children, youth and community against poor, mal, negligent or unethical child and youht care practice.
This has appeared in a past blog ...the moment sticks with me and came again to mind. The then Minister of the Department "Welfare", Minister Geraldine Fraser- Moleketsi said at a National Association of Child and Youth Care Workers (NACCW) conference - way back in the 90's "I look forward to the day when a child and youth care worker will be able to report from records that a child or young person has tantrummed three times less this week that she did last week."
Tantrum counting and logging like any other goal-orientated observable behaviours, have to be reported and recorded in today's South African professional methodology. We have it all in place. Minister Fraser-Moleketsi's wish day came about in South Africa easily several decades ago.
The question on Facebook "How do we know if we are delivering a quality service?" can be approached in one way (among others) through measurement. We all know this. It starts with the initial care plan and carefully structured observations logged daily. Then within a given time period. the child and youth care worker puts together a developmental assessment (DA). Consolidation of all party's DA's happens at the Multi- professional Case Management meeting (Previously called the multi-disciplinary team). An Individual Development Plan (IDP) is agreed. It now that our recording responsibilities, tasks and accountability are all set out as goals, tasks and time- frames for all involved including the child or young person with agreed constant periods of review. Logging continues now with the developmental purpose measured up-front.
What is being said here?
How do we know if we are delivering a quality child and youth care service? If the tasks are undertaken and the goals are being met, then within these parameters, our practice is to some extent measured.
It is however more complicated than this. In South Africa we have what are called practice principles. Interesting is that Geraldine Fraser-Moleketsi was party to compiling these together with Leslie du Toit of the NACCW. The mechanical counting and tick-box checklists and the achievement of goals has to practiced within practice and policy which actively demonstrate that these practice principles are being applied. I'm going to list them without explanation just in case they may have been lost somewhere in organisational and professional practice. Participation, Rights of young people, Restorative justice, Appropriateness, Family preservation, Permanency planning, African renaissance. Family-centered, Continuum of care, Integration, Continuity of care, Normalisation, Effective and efficient, Child-centered.
Quality Care is measurable and principled.
Still... How do we know?
Back to statistics. There is this thing called recidivism. It's a measurement of the percentage of the children and young people, who having transitioned out of the child and youth care programme, then return into it. The lower is the percentage, the better s the programme ranked. My problem with recidivism statistics is this...I know of only one franchise of facilities which may have the recording tools and the capacity to monitor recidivism within its consortium only. If there are others I would be pleased to know. But, nationally I think that some young people get lost through the cracks. If, for example, a young person comes into a diversion programme, completes the programme but has to be placed later in another progamme in another city, in another province, or more particularly at age 18 lands up in prison, do we know? There are examples of this. In doing quality assurance work in Child and Youth Care Centres in Gauteng we couldn't establish in the local/regional courts whether a young person may have moved to another locality or region and entered the judicial system there. So, on the basis of recidivism what is the quality of service practiced in the original placement Centre?
Then again, there has been a view that we cannot establish 'success' in child and youth care work. The idea is that success cant be measured. What, it was said is that we deal with the reduction of failure. The statistics thrown around said something like: If a child or young person comes into a programme, notwithstanding the quality of the programme and practice,11% of them have the natural resilience to bounce back and to cope following transition. If a young person comes into a programme, which, notwithstanding the quality of the programme, has consistency, then the figure increases to about 20%. So, the argument is that we can't chalk up practice success, what we can do is to establish the reduction of the possibility of failure for a remaining 80% of our programme intake..... how do we do that? The through flow ...so many in...so many out is a statistic but has to be adjusted to take into account that quite a number of young people would have coped, developed and transitioned anyway.
Child and youth care workers say that there are unmeasurables in trying to establish the quality of our practice. This is where child and youth care workers have particular professional skills. It in our skill of profiling descriptively the children and young people in our care programmes. We seem to be able to find examples, images and words to describe shifts in otherwise unmeasurables. Outside of tick-boxes, we recognise shifts in world view, in values, in attitude, which underlie behavior as young people develop through our professional care. Shifts like, for example, moves toward co-operation rather than competition, others rather than self, understanding parentability .. the list goes on.
We have a poor record of longitudinal studies, but some of us know how the 40 plus year olds are coping and through some of these contact keepers, are our best indicators of the quality of our child and youth care practice services.
"Uncle Barrie, I'm worried about you, I think that you are struggling in your retirement. Can I help you?"
No comments:
Post a Comment