University of Queensland researchers are participating in a project to produce policy and practice guidelines for joint cases involving child projection and mental health service workers.
Dr Yvonne Darlington from UQ’s School of Social Work and Applied Human Sciences, and Associate Professor Judith Feeney from the School of Psychology are working with the Queensland Department of Child Safety in the three-year long study.
More than 100 child safety officers have volunteered to participate in the four-phase research project, which includes a state-wide survey, in-depth interviews, case studies and the eventual development of the new guidelines and policies.
Dr Darlington said preliminary findings from the first stage of the project were encouraging.
“Early findings from the questionnaire revealed that workers in both systems had positive attitudes towards clients with mental illness and towards workers in the other system,” she said.
“The findings also indicated that workers felt there was not enough collaboration occurring and identified issues such as resourcing, insufficient support services for parents, confidentiality issues and the need for training.”
Dr Darlington said phase two of the research, which involves tracking families with a mentally ill parent through the child protection system over a 12-month period, had 17 child protection staff currently participating.
She said another 19 child safety officers participated in the third phase of the project, which involved in-depth interviews with case workers in child protection, adult mental health and youth mental health.
The final stage of the research project will result in the establishment of a panel of experts to review and refine the practice guidelines developed from the earlier phases.
The panel will include staff from the Department of Child Safety as well as other expert practitioners.
Minister for Child Safety Mike Reynolds said the project would look at what happens when mental health and child protection workers collaborate on cases where there is a parent with a mental illness who is suspected of child abuse or neglect.
“Parental mental illness has shown to be not only a common contributing factor for children taken into care, but also for children remaining in care for protracted periods,” Mr Reynolds said.
The research project is funded by the National Mental Health and Medical Research Council and is based at the St Lucia campus of The University of Queensland.
Media: for more information, contact Dr Yvonne Darlington (email y.darlington@social.uq.edu.au) or Dr Judith Feeney (telephone 07 3365 6412, email judy@psy.uq.edu.au) or David Ashkanasy at UQ Communications (telephone 3365 9723, email d.ashkanasy@uq.edu.au).
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