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According to the Swedish Social Services Act, all health personnel are required to report children whom they suspect are subject to maltreatment. This paper describes the organizational and professional conditions in four Swedish children's hospitals regarding the reporting process. Specifically, the study focused on knowledge of risk to children, legal frameworks and the perceptions of organizational support and explored the differences between the hospitals and professional groups. The method used was a quantitative questionnaire, and 295 personnel responded. Hospitals differed in the level of organizational support offered to staff. Importantly, the professional groups showed different levels of knowledge and awareness about structures supporting their reporting obligations, with nurses and nurse assistants showing a lower level of awareness than physicians and hospital social workers. The paper argues that all professional groups need to have equal access to education, with the opportunity to become more involved in the assessment and reporting process and to strengthen multidisciplinary structures. Further, this would reduce risk, dispel the perception that work with children is ‘dirty work’ and counter strategies of avoidance among some professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through adoption, the state actively contributes to creating families. It therefore also assumes the role of guarantor of the child's best interests in the adoption process, which entails assessing the suitability of presumptive adoptive parents. In the present paper, we use the concluding sections of assessment reports on applicants for intercountry adoption in Sweden to answer the following question: what must be said about an individual or a couple in order for her/them to be seen as a suitable adoptive parent? We thus assume that report conclusions serve to display parent suitability to their audiences. The assessment aligns with Swedish national adoption guidelines, and the study shows how the assessment handbook comes to serve as a catalogue of arguments that not only define good parenthood but also outline a way of life that is suitable for parenthood. The analysis illustrates how valid arguments for granting consent to adopt refer to three layers of suitability. They include not only the applicants' insights into and knowledge about adoption in particular and children in general but also their conventional and orderly life, i.e. a life free from distractions that could hinder a wholehearted focus on children and family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a performance management system for reviewing the quality of written analyses in child‐protection investigations. The system, called quality of the analysis (QUAL), is based on the Swedish adaptation of the British Integrated Children's System and Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families called Children's Needs in Focus (BBIC). QUAL was applied to 280 child‐protection investigations to review the compliance with the BBIC standards. The investigations took place in 2011 and 2014. The results indicate improvements in various quality indicators, such as answers provided to all investigative questions, both risk and protective factors documented, and an assessment of the child's need for protection or support documented. However, in 40% of the investigations from 2014, the analytical stage was more a summary than an analysis. Many countries struggle to find and develop tools that can provide feasible systematic feedback on professional performance and support quality improvement in child‐protection work. We suggest that QUAL can be used as one method among others to develop and strengthen the analytical work in practice by visualizing and monitoring the written analysis. QUAL may function as a tool to stimulate professional development, facilitate organizational learning, and improve investigative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of children's agency can be used to understand how children actively shape their lives. While in social work there is a growing body of research on how children experience meetings that involve collaborating professionals, little is known about the ways in which they exert an influence. The purpose of the study is, in a Swedish context, to investigate children's perceptions of their agentic capacity in regulating participation and exerting an influence on outcomes in interprofessional collaborative meetings. Interviews were carried out with 28 children in receipt of social services support. Findings revealed that children perceive professionals' talk as restricting opportunities for input. They also perceive that they have the capacity to exercise agency by (i) conforming to expectations by feigning boredom and seeming disengaged, but at the same time paying close attention; (ii) by using exit strategies; and (iii) by developing ‘in‐situ’ strategies to end meetings. Rather than, as previously suggested, being powerless in such circumstances, the children tell how they carefully assess situations, and, from a position of apparent subordination, talk of ways of acting that reveal their agentic capacity. These insights are of importance for practitioners who are encouraged to look beyond behaviours that first meet the eye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]