A protocol for interagency collaboration and family participation: Practitioners’ perspectives on the Client Network Consultation

Abstract

Interagency collaboration has many advantages, but seems hard to realise in practice. In Belgium, the need for collaboration between the practitioners in the field of child welfare and child psychiatry, especially for children and adolescents with complex health care needs, was identified. Children with complex health care needs require coordinated care and collaboration between the different sectors in child mental health care (child welfare, child psychiatry, disability care). The authors have developed a standardised protocol based on the wraparound principles, which support interagency collaboration with family participation, named Client Network Consultation (CNC). Focus groups evaluated the CNC by eliciting practitioners' views on the structure, content and impact of collaborative interagency protocols with family involvement. Thematic analysis revealed four core themes: (1) Empowering the child and the family; (2) Utilising the strength of the collective; (3) Being considerate versus constructive a dilemma for participants in CNC; and (4) The structure of a protocol offers opportunities and challenges. Results of the study offer implications for daily practice. Several challenges for interprofessional (IP) practice in the complex field of child and adolescent mental health care are described. The value of the CNC protocol to engage families in a clinical process is also discussed.

Organization of rehabilitation services for youth with physical disabilities and mental health problems: A scoping review

“…When looking at how services were organized and delivered (research sub-question 1), several ( n = 6) articles ( 33 – 35 , 43 – 45 ) described what was currently being done in practice to address the high need for mental health services. These will be detailed further below.…”

“…Only two formal models of service delivery for co-occurring physical and mental health problems were described across the retained articles ( 43 , 45 ). The first model found through this review was the Biopsychosocial, Collaborative, and Agency-based Service Integration Approach, developed in Canada and presented in a conceptual paper by Scratch and colleagues in 2020 ( 43 ).…”

“…Phase II focuses on creating and evaluating a comprehensive model of health care provision where the capacity of staff on the rehabilitation team in relation to mental health and psychosocial needs increases, and mental health specialists are fully integrated as interdisciplinary rehabilitation team members. The second model of service delivery found through this review was the Client Network Consultation (CNC) model developed in Belgium by Van Dongen and colleagues in 2018 ( 45 ). Described in a qualitative paper, specialist clinicians from different teams (including child welfare, psychiatry, and rehabilitation) participated in 3 focus groups to inform and evaluate an interagency collaboration in mental health care for children with complex healthcare needs.…”

Correlation Clustering of Stable Angina Clinical Care Patterns for 506 Thousand Patients

“… The K-means clustering [ 33 ], a vector quantization method, provides 21 clusters as subnetworks of our 3 clusters. The ModuLand tool is able to determine hierarchical layers of overlapping network modules [ 34 ]. When used this tool on our network, it produced 37 clusters at the hierarchical level 0 which were subnetworks of our clusters, and it produced only 1 cluster with all nodes at the hierarchical level 1.…”

A Universal Early Parenting Education Intervention in Community-Based Primary Care Settings: Development and Installation Challenges

“…Interagency services and supports may range from a low level of consultation and/or joint decision making to more collaborative models of joint working [22], whilst integrated models may involve in-depth shared work in relation to a client or a group of clients [23]. Benefits for prevention and early intervention initiatives have been cited as including increased service efficiency and equity [24,25], as well as increased practitioner access to knowledge, enhanced social capital and staff capacity development [26,27]. However, barriers to collaborative partnerships in child and youth services have also been identified and include high staff turnover, insufficient knowledge of partners, lack of commitment and buy-in, a dearth of resources and/or capacity for partnership working, and resistance and conflict amongst partners, incompatible ideologies and agency cultures [28,29].…”