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Understanding pathways between social care workers' Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19)-related stress and poorer mental health outcomes can inform employers' efforts to support the well-being of staff. The present study engaged 103 workers at an Irish Non-Government Organisation providing child and family support services. In the initial months following the cessation of pandemic restrictions in 2022, they completed an anonymous online survey that included questions about their experiences of COVID-19, their professional quality of life and their mental health. The aim was to explore the direct effect of COVID-related stress on workers' mental health, and the indirect effect through the mediators of compassion satisfaction and the compassion fatigue components of burnout and secondary traumatic stress. The results indicated that greater levels of pandemic stress are significantly and directly related to both increased burnout and poorer mental health, and that burnout also partially mediates the relationship between pandemic stress and poorer mental health. This study adds to a growing body of work concerned to better understand the social care workers' pandemic experiences, and results are discussed in terms of apprising employers of the need for timely and effective staff supports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been considerable interest in recent years in comparing the operation of social work services for children and families internationally, particularly between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Reviewing the respective policy environments and drawing on recent research experience in these three nations, the author speculates as to how such services may be placed to respond to a converging agenda to tackle the high social and economic costs of social exclusion. It is argued that a conspiracy of circumstances have led child and family social work away from its more general child welfare objectives of the past and have created consolidation of functions in relation to child-protection work. This has left services ill-prepared to play a central role within a new and resurgent child welfare agenda. If child-protection systems are to successfully metamorphose to encompass child welfare ideals, they will need to reconfigure to help shape their own future. This future will be concerned with the identification of, and service provision to, marginalised populations predicted to create high lifetime social and economic costs for society--the alternative being a default to the reductionist position of child-protection agencies largely concerned with the management of "child abuse".

Providers of therapeutic services to children and families have, in recent times, been subject to pressure to supplement traditional service output measures with evidence-based measures, which capture outcomes for service users. In this article, we report on the near decade long establishment of a range of standardised measures within an Irish non-governmental agency providing therapeutic help to children and families across two settings, family centres and early childhood development services. We describe the organisational conditions necessary for the introduction of standardised outcome measures and provide an illustrative overview of participant characteristics and some examples of key findings across both services as they relate to the important outcome domains of child and parent functioning. We further propose a model for the introduction and sustainability of outcome measures as a necessary and enduring feature of therapeutically orientated organisations providing services to children and families. Lastly, we identify organisational commitment to the development of outcome data, plans to ensure sustainable arrangements for ongoing data analysis, and conceptual linkage between evidence informed practice and the values of an organisation as key considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we report the results of the introduction of measures to ascertain the impact of therapeutic services for families where domestic violence has taken place. The setting is a specialist service for families located in Dublin, Ireland. The overall goal of the intervention was the ending of violence. To help achieve this, therapies sought to reduce conflict, promote better parental mental health and improve the quality of relationships between parents and children. Using validated instruments, measures were taken at Time 1 (entering service) from seventy-one mothers and forty fathers. At the time of data analysis for this article thirty-seven mothers and twenty-four fathers had completed the Time 2 (leaving service) surveys. Results indicate significant reduction in conflict between participating partners, and improvements in parental mental health and quality of parent–child relationships. These results add support to the view that whilst intervention goals must include the cessation of domestic violence, this can only be achieved with due attention to the complexity of the causes. The use of validated instruments is helpful in seeking to establish outcomes measures that may supplement more traditional measures of efficacy of interventions within specialist services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals with higher numbers of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been found to be overrepresented amongst users of social services. This poses challenges for service providers in seeking ways to incorporate knowledge about ACEs in the calibration of service provision, and for social workers as to how they might use such knowledge in their day-to-day practice. The key contribution of this article is as a position piece that aims to map out a possible response to the ACEs evidence from social work. Practice needs to be informed by an understanding of the causes and consequences of trauma in the lives of individuals and groups. Short-term interventions based on proximal causes have resulted in a fundamental misunderstanding as to the aetiology of the problems experienced and to the types of interventions required to facilitate their amelioration. ACEs research offers a new understanding of how connecting trajectories are formed and maintained in ways that integrate biological, psychological and sociological concepts. In this article, we have made selective use of key texts and studies in the social work literature to illustrate how relationship-based social work may be appropriated and repurposed to align with interventions to mitigate the effects of ACEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we engage with some of the fundamental concepts underpinning the original adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) study and subsequent work, whilst recognising that the terminology of ACEs has in some ways become reductionist and problematic. Although an imperfect concept covering a range of childhood adversities at a personal, intrapersonal and community level, ACEs have utility in bridging scientific and lay communities. The evidence clearly identifies that 'numbers matter' and that whereas children may be able to cope with a little adversity over a short period of time when they have good support networks, too much adversity over too long a time period, even with good support, will be problematic for the child and their family. Alongside exploring the cumulative impact of adversity, social workers and other professionals need to engage with the temporal component of when adversity is experienced, and for how long, together with the consequences for helping services in deciding when to intervene and for what period of time. This opens the discussion of who is best placed to support children and families experiencing certain types of adversity and how we think about structural issues such as poverty and community violence within the ACEs discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in the development of evidence supporting therapeutic interventions in social work. Few examples, however, exist, of the use of validated instrumentation in measuring the impact of services upon children and families. We report here on the use of a suite of validated instruments to measure the impact of services on children and their parents in receipt of services provided by an Irish Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) across their seven family centres. The NGO engaged a team of university-based researchers who provided training in the use of validated instruments, monitored implementation of their use and analysed the resulting data. Over a two-year period, 968 families were surveyed at Time 1 (entering the service), with 452 completing surveys at Time 2 (leaving the service). The results indicate a decrease in children's emotional and social problems, with those with highest scores at Time 1 making most progress by Time 2. Similarly, it was evident that interventions had a positive impact upon parental mental health and, with regard to child–parent relationships, both children and their parents reported positive changes. Such findings lay emphasis on the importance of measuring the impact of services on individual psychological functioning and interfamilial relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has demonstrated conclusively that the experience of adversities in childhood increases the risks for poor outcomes in the domains of physical and mental health and economic and social circumstances across the life course. This has produced a wave of interest in the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences internationally, with developments in policy across the UK nations reflective of this. The translation of such research and policy development has witnessed the growing dominance of the 'toxic stress model' as underpinning the early signalling of troubles in children. Such signals are further conceptualised as the presence of 'trauma'. It is upon these conceptual pillars that therapeutically orientated services are being built. In this article, we describe these developments, offering as they do, challenges to short-term interventions as well as providing opportunities for social workers to appropriate the developing knowledge base so as to inform more effective ways of working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a qualitative study undertaken with twenty-two young carers across Northern Ireland aged between eight and eighteen. It focuses on their experiences as informal care-givers in households where at least one family member was living with an illness and/or disability. While much has been written about the quantifiable aspects of informal care including the number of hours spent caring and the physical nature of caring tasks, this approach has tended to subsume individual experiences within the category 'young carer' and fails to differentiate between sub-populations of children and young people whose caring relationships may be very disparate. Whilst there has been a tendency to focus on the vulnerability of young carers, explanations as to why some experience greater physical, emotional and psycho-social difficulties than others are underdeveloped. It has been suggested that differential outcomes may be attributable to a capacity for resilience, which can lessen vulnerability. The study examined the protective and risk factors, which might help to promote or challenge the resilience of young carers. It was found that knowledge of and response to both the nature and trajectory of illness or disability contributed to young carers' capacity for resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]