Foster care and Medicaid managed care

Children in the foster care system are often dependent on Medicaid for health care. These children, however, have more complex health care needs than the typical child receiving Medicaid. States are implementing Medicaid managed care programs as a way to control escalating costs while providing necessary services. This article reviews the issues surrounding delivery of managed health care services to children in foster care and describes several solutions.     

Ready or not: assessing youths' preparedness for independent living

This article discusses the utility of the Ansell-Casey Life Skills Assessment (ACLSA) in assessing life skills necessary for living successfully in the community upon emancipation from out-of-home care. ACLSA, completed by youths and their caregivers, identifies skills that have been mastered and those yet to be learned. Assessment information can be used for goal setting, strength identification, and relationship building, as well as to direct program planning and training in self-sufficiency services.     

Adaptive,Agile Approaches to Organizational Architecture Utilizing Agent Technology*

Intelligent agent-based approaches to software support systems are believed to provide an unparalleled technology for integrating people, materials, and capital equipment. Software agents can be used to automate mechanization strategies for reducing the information content of work. As such, software agents diminish the need for utilizing humans to do repetitive, programmable tasks. The purpose of studies of communities of intelligent agents is to ascertain their ability to accommodate flexible, agile organizational structures that can respond rapidly to changes in the marketplace, increase throughput, reduce costs, and improve quality. This paper presents a conceptual prototype for agent-based structural selfdesign and describes experiments conducted regarding such studies together with the results obtained.     

The health and development of children whose mothers are on methadone maintenance

The health and development of a group of children aged 3-7 years born to and reared by mothers who abused opiates when pregnant and who remain on methadone maintenance was compared to a group of age and socially matched control children. There was no difference between the two groups in terms of health and development although the children whose mothers were on methadone had smaller head circumference measurements than the controls. More than half of the index children had been on the child protection register during infancy; all but one were off the register at the time of the study. The results suggest that drug-abusing women who are on methadone maintenance and attending a drug dependency unit may rear and care for their children as well as parents from a similar social background who are not drug abusers.     

Participation as a right to the city: Iranian children’s perspectives about their inclusion in urban decision-making

To assess children's willingness to participate in decision-making about urban environments, Iranian children were invited to tell their stories about child inclusion in city affairs. The findings demonstrate children's enthusiasm to have a say, their suggestions of how their ideas can be integrated into planning, and their competency for participation. Despite their willingness, participants indicated awareness of patriarchal cultural views of children and childhood which continue to exclude them from planning involvement. Being denied the exercise of their rights to the city generates a marginalised status, alienating children from achieving appropriate engagement.     

Feeling Attached and Feeling Accepted: Implications for Political Inclusion among Visible Minority Immigrants in Canada

Immigrants’ sense of belonging to their host communities is viewed as a core condition for their successful inclusion, but there is no consensus on which attributes of belonging are most relevant to understanding inclusion, nor is there agreement on how the sense of belonging ought to be measured empirically. This study examines how two related but independent dimensions of belonging help to better understand the political inclusion of visible minority immigrants in Canada. More specifically, it examines the role of feeling attached (immigrants’ feeling toward the host community) and the role of feeling accepted (immigrants’ sense of how their host communities feel about them). We assess the relationship between attachment, acceptance and political inclusion for both first- and second-generation visible minority Canadians; the results suggest there is analytical value in utilising separate measures of attachment and acceptance: political inclusion is more likely when both are stronger.