Responding to child deaths: the work of Australia's Victorian Child Death Review Committee

The Victorian Child Death Review Committee (VCDRC) in Australia is a multidisciplinary Ministerial Advisory Committee established to review the deaths of children either currently child protection clients or known to the statutory child protection system. The Committee provides advice about each child death as well as insights into what are the surrounding patterns and issues. Key to this role is examining the contribution of the service sectors to the protection of children and the routine practices that are in place to respond to children and vulnerability. This paper provides a snapshot of the cases referred to the VCDRC and the key messages for practice drawn from them. What emerges is that often the threshold for when statutory child protection services must be involved in child and family matters can be ambiguous and that agreement about intervention, the level and nature of need or risk, and when cumulative harm and neglect require statutory responses are not always shared between agencies. It is clear that the lack of common frameworks about what constitutes child protection intervention challenges services. It is recommended that there be and used agreed definitions and frameworks to ensure shared understandings and collaborative responses across the service and legal systems.     

The marginalisation of children by the legal process

A major study carried out in the Melbourne Children's Court, Victoria, Australia, during 1993–1995, of the factors that influence magistrates' decision-making in child abuse cases, found that magistrates relied more on their legal training and individual discretion than on information from the child protection service when making these decisions. Magistrates' emphasis on adversarial procedures meant that the need to establish the facts in a case was the court's primary consideration and that children's interests, and welfare concerns about them, were marginalised in the hearing of child abuse matters. The article reports on this aspect of the larger study: how the adversarial process ill serves the rights, and best interests, of children in the hearing of child abuse matters and provides case examples to illustrate this. The information is drawn from the qualitative and quantitative data gathered for the major study; data collected from the observation of court hearings, interviews with magistrates and court record analysis.     

What Do Patients Want?: Personal Disclosure and the Intersubjective Perspective

Increasingly clinical work has explored the value of disclosure, particularly personal disclosure, in the therapeutic process. This new found freedom to reveal has also raised alarm amongst some clinicians. This paper explores the current debate surrounding personal disclosure and its relationship to intersubjective perspectives. Clinical vignettes help elaborate the issues, providing an integration of theory and practice, and one that is consistent with social work’s attention to the environment.     

Differentiation of Self and the Process of Forgiveness: A Clinical Perspective for Couple and Family Therapy

In this article we explore the role of differentiation of self in facilitating forgiveness in the context of couple and family relationships. Differentiation is defined from the Bowen perspective as the ability to connect with others without being excessively emotionally reactive to the ebb and flow inherent in all significant relationships (being able to connect to others yet also being able to self‐regulate). Forgiveness is described as the releasing of an emotional injury via a complex psychological and relational process that is less an act of will than a discovery or possibility through understanding and empathy. Differentiation of self is related to emotional intelligence and empathy. The developmental and relational benefits of such are illustrated and discussed. A rationale for viewing differentiation and forgiveness in a contextual, historical, and relational attachment paradigm is suggested. Relevant clinical cases illustrate the dynamics of differentiation and forgiveness as discovery in the context of an understanding and empathic relational environment.     

Use of a values history in approaching medical advance directives with psychiatric patients

The Patient Self-Determination Act became federal law in 1990. However, many psychiatric facilities are just beginning to actively address the issue of medical advance directives. The term advance directives, for the purposes of this article, refers exclusively to medical advance directives. Psychiatric advance directives, which are related to issues such as involuntary hospitalization, are beyond the scope of this article.     

The golden star: an emotional repertoire of scientific discovery and legacy

This paper examines vocabularies of emotion in the discovery narratives of a group of genetic scientists. The discovery of the gene for myotonic dystrophy in 1992 was part of a unique and highly competitive phase of molecular genetic research into single gene hereditary conditions. Members of a small group of scientists who made a significant contribution to the discovery of the gene were interviewed sixteen years later about the impact of that discovery. They structured their memories into narrative accounts characterized by vivid recall, colourful language and use of an emotional repertoire to reconstruct the dynamics, relationships and personal meaning of the discovery. The focus of this emotional language was on what it meant to be a molecular scientist, the dynamics of the incremental work that led to eventual success, the networks surrounding the team and the legacy of discovery in relation to science and to the individual scientists. The emotional repertoire revealed subtle differences between accounts, where there was universal recognition of the importance of the discovery for a scientific career but ambivalence regarding its personal meaning for some key actors.     

The Microfoundations of Dynamic Capabilities for Incremental and Radical Innovation in Knowledge-Intensive Businesses

We theorize and test the impact of two microfoundations of dynamic capabilities on incremental and radical innovation in knowledge-intensive businesses (KIBs). We argue that numerical flexibility and training, as human resources (HR) microfoundations that enable the configuration and deployment of resources, have different implications for incremental and radical innovation. Furthermore, we contend that those KIBs that make significant use of numerical flexibility will invest less in training, thus impacting innovation outcomes. We test our arguments using an original, longitudinal dyadic dataset assembled from 1750 structured interviews conducted with HR directors and senior managers in 875 KIBs located in Finland, France, Sweden and the UK. We find that numerical flexibility is negatively related to both incremental and radical innovation, whereas training is positively related to both. Our test of the moderating impact of training on both types of innovation resulting from the use of numerical flexibility was not statistically significant. Overall, we suggest that not all efforts by KIBs to mobilize resources and capabilities and align them with a complex external environment in the pursuit of innovation are necessarily beneficial. We highlight some research, policy, and practice implications that arise from our findings.     

'The Tip of the Ice Berg': Children's Complaints and Advocacy in Wales--An Insider View from Complaints Officers

This paper is based on findings of a Welsh Assembly Governmentfunded review of children’s independent advocacy servicesin Wales with reference to their involvement in complaints madeby children, or by their parents or carers on their behalf,about local authority social services. It draws, primarily,upon qualitative interviews with local authority children’scomplaints officers, whose task is to receive complaints orconcerns, field these to appropriate social services staff,maintain oversight of their progression and keep complainantsinformed of developments. The paper describes the challengesthat complaints officers perceive children encounter in movingcomplaints forward, especially in a context where independentadvocacy services are involved and where these services areviewed with some suspicion by social services staff. It suggeststhat complaints officers play a pivotal part in managing thesometimes contested and complex interface between service providerand child and may do so from a position of limited authorityand influence. The role of complaints officers in engaging withcomplainants and their advocates, and with those colleaguesimplicated in complaints, has rarely been the topic of research.This paper provides accounts from these key staff that helpilluminate the tensions and difficulties that can enter thechildren’s complaints process.     

Education and Health Conditions Among the Currently Incarcerated and the Non-incarcerated Populations

Population Research and Policy Review - Previous research has found a strong link between educational attainment and health, where the highly educated live longer and healthier lives than those...