Placing the child at the centre of care requires professionals and organisations to adopt a position that recognises and responds to the child or young person’s best interests (Appleton, Powell and Coombes, 2014, unpublished report to NSPCC). As Munro (2011a, 2011b; p6) stated in her review of child protection, the child protection system needs to focus not on procedural aspects and bureaucratic systems, but on ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘checking whether children and young people are being helped’. This was the message from recent research that highlighted that a child’s missed health care appointment should be regarded as ‘a window of opportunity for intervention, to keep the child at the centre of care, and safe and well ’ (Appleton et al., 2014, unpublished report to NSPCC; p55). Keeping the child at the centre of care is crucially important in all frontline work with children and families.
Keeping the child at the centre of care is a theme in the latest issue of Child Abuse Review, now available online.
We feature an excellent paper by Brigid Daniel considering why we have made neglect so complicated and offering some fresh perspectives on how we can notice and help the neglected child, as well as research on child welfare, protecting unborn and newborn babies, shaken baby syndrome prevention in Turkey, engaging fathers, and professionals dealing with complexity.
For the full contents list, and to download any of the papers, click here