Auditing mental health aspects of child protection

Auditing Mental Health Aspects of Child ProtectionChild protection is a multi-agency responsibility, in which expertise held by dierent professionals is mobilised in order to recognise, assess and intervene into problems of parenting.Good collaboration between the dierent professionals is therefore key to eective network functioning, in which each agency recognises the relevance of the others and maintains clear lines of communication with them.Cases of fatal child abuse have provided evidence of the tragic consequences of practitioners failing to collaborate and communicate together eectively (e.g.Reder, Duncan and Gray, 1993).The contribution of mental health services to child protection practice has become the focus of increasing interest in recent years.There has been evidence in the literature for some time of a relationship between parental mental health problems, especially substance misuse, and child maltreatment (e.g.Browne and Saqi, 1988;Falkov, 1998;Cleaver, Unell and Aldgate, 1998; Reder and Duncan, forthcoming) and also fatal child abuse (Falkov, 1996;Wilczynski, 1997;Sanders, Colton and Roberts, 1999).Even so, adult mental health services are still considered by many to be a missing link in the child protection system since their sta tend not to contribute to the work of Area Child Protection Committees or to child protection conferences.Our recent analysis of `Part 8' Reviews (Reder and Duncan, 1999) highlighted a particular problem about inter-agency collaboration when a parent was believed to be suering from a mental health problem.We have called it `assessment paralysis', because all decisions about the family appeared to depend on a psychiatric opinion as to whether the parent suered at the time from a diagnosable psychiatric disorder.If their conclusion was that the parent did not, and therefore could not be admitted to hospital under a Section of the Mental Health Act, then no further action was taken by any member of the network to intervene with either the Child Abuse Review Vol.8: 147±151 (1999)