The development
of quality thinking in the area of Child Welfare
by Sari Laaksonen
It
all started
from increased quality thinking in other fields of society, especially
in business. The idea became stronger in the beginning of 1990s
due to the heavy depression in Finland – there was a need
to reduce costs but still get the job done well. Different projects
and aims of the European Union also furthered quality thinking.
Quality thinking reached social welfare and child welfare in the mid
1990s. Quality management in child welfare started to develop
through different projects on a broad front and in national
co-operation:
Central
Union for Child Welfare’s project on quality 1996-1999
The
project introduced quality thinking and the basic three elements:
the qualities of structure, process and result:
•STRUCTURE:
basic conditions (location, premises, staff, group size, management,
supervision, documentation, etc.)
•PROCESS:
the process of taking into care and the process of care and
education
•RESULT:
meeting the needs of the child, goals of the careplan
Sixteen
quality development pilots among providers of extra familial care
were started, each of them choosing the focus of development arising
from their own situation. Based on the experiences of these pilots
the project produced training and publications on the elements of
quality, clarifying the basic task and profile, developing the evaluation
and documentation, leadership, family care and the care of multi-problem
children.
CUCW’s
II project on quality 2001-2004
The project running now concentrates on the quality of the process.
The aim is to produce national criteria for the quality of
extra-familial care - for self evaluation of the service unit, for
users of the services and for the inspectors. Furthermore the aim is
to create a model for a voluntary auditing system based on regional,
multi-professional groups of experts.
The
building of criteria starts from describing the process of extra-familial
care. The description is done nationwide: there are six pilot areas,
which altogether have 65 service units (for example, children’s
homes) working on the description. At the starting point,
the process of extra-familial care is divided into five nuclear
processes:
Each
nuclear process is then opened in details. As an example, the process
of placement :
These process charts will change during the project: the directing
group of the project analyses the different descriptions built up
by the pilot areas and creates a synthesis of them.
The
national criteria for the quality of extrafamilial care will be
based on the information from the pilot areas, the laws and amendments
concerning extra-familial work and knowledge gained from recent
research on quality and child welfare. In the beginning of 2003
the pilots have completed the process of placement and are working
on the care and education
process. During 2003 work on the process chart and the criteria
will be completed and development of the auditing system started.
A
very important question in doing research and development projects
is how to implement the new information in practice. In this project
the staffs in different child welfare units participate actively
in creating of the national criteria – we hope it is easier for
them to be committed to something they themselves or their peers
have worked with.
We have also from the very beginning of the project co-operated
with The Ministry of Social Welfare and Health, the provincial governments,
the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities and National
Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health to get the
criteria which are emerging as widely recognised as possible.
For more information please contact:
planning officer Sari Laaksonen
Central Union for Child Welfare, Finland
tel.
+ 358 9 32 96 02 05, sari.laaksonen@lskl.fi
