User Empowerment or Family Self-Reliance? The Family Group Conference Model

How to Improve Health Care for Cochlear Implant Children from Turkish Families Living in Holland

“…This is an intervention developed in New Zealand to empower parents. The FGC model aims to turn the traditional decision-making process on its head: rather than the family members attending a meeting dominated by the presence and agenda of professionals, the FGC is predominantly a meeting of the family group (Lupton, 1998). Professionals attend in the capacity of information-giver, rather than as the involved professional.…”

A family group conference pilot project: Evaluation and discussion

“…Arguably, the considerable enthusiasm and increasing support for the development of family group conferences among social work practitioners in the UK sometimes overlooks the critical reservations that have been expressed (Lupton, 1998 In regard to the first two questions, whatever their views on the success or failure of the conference they were involved in, in this project only two family participants thought that social services were seeking to reduce expenditure or had failed to deliver their promises. There were few signs of 'rubber stamping' and family participants certainly did not think that they were pressurised, even in the one instance where there was cynicism about the department's motives.…”

“…This may reflect the fact that, unlike social workers, they do not typically come to any meeting with social services with totally clear expectations about process. Indeed, other research has found that as many as a third of family participants were uncertain about what was going to happen and what was expected of them (Lupton, 1998;Marsh and Crow, 1998). However, this was not the case in this project.…”

Mediation and family group conferences in adult safeguarding

“…Unlike in M, where the mediator will facilitate the entire session, the FGC co-ordinator and any public authority represented in the FGC are not present for a period of time in the second part of the meeting, to allow the family to find their own solutions (commonly known as ''private family time''). This principle expresses the emphasis upon mobilising and remobilising the participant's own network to bring new resources into the existing network, in order to help the participant to find solutions to specific questions or problems (Lupton, 1998;Malmberg-Heimonen, 2011). …”

“…A Local Government Improvement and Development review (Humphries, 2010) on adult safeguarding recommended the development of M and FGC approaches because of their potential to offer better outcomes and efficiencies. However, while family-led approaches to decision making have been the subject of considerable scrutiny within the context of child welfare ( Barnsdale and Walker, 2007;Brown, 2002;Burford et al, 2009;Fox, 2008;Kelly, 2004;Levine, 2000;Lupton, 1998;Lupton and Nixon, 1999;Mackay and Brown, 1998;Marsh and Crow, 1997;Pennell and Anderson, 2005;Polk, 1994;Sheets et al, 2009;Sieppert et al, 2000;Shlonsky et al, 2009;Sundell and Vinnerljung, 2004), there is a lack of robust evidence on the benefits of M and FGC in adult settings, and its cost-effectiveness [3].…”