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Meeting the psychiatric needs of children in foster care

Social workers' views

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Jeannette Phillips*
Affiliation:
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AZ
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Abstract

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This study sought social workers' views on the mental health needs of a sample of foster children. Out of the sample 80% of the children were considered to require treatment from a child mental health professional but only 27% had received any input. The reasons given for not referring for treatment were placement instability, inadequate child mental health resources and insufficient local authority funding. The provision of consultation services to allocated social workers and the availability of child mental health professionals at local authority reviews should be considered.

Type
Original Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 The Royal College of Psychiatrists

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