Interdisciplinary teams and decision making in child protection systems: The experience of Catalonia

Abstract

After a little more than 10 years of existence, the experience of Catalonia of having a network of de-centralised interdisciplinary teams (EAIAs) to assess all high socially risky situations for children is still unique in Spain. Up to now, the regional Autonomous Government has never adopted any systematic evaluation procedure of the overall Program and no resources seem to be available to do it in the next future; therefore no overall data is available about the work done by EAIA teams. Knowledge accumulated by professionals after 10 years of activity has been considered of important value for all social agents. A data collection has been organised with an ad-hoc questionnaire on perceptions, opinions, evaluations and expectations on future developments from a sample of practitioners members of EAIA teams, as a partial contribution to a necessary analysis and professional debate. Results show that the project is considered to have highly contributed to improve the child protection system in Catalonia and that some goals of the overall Program are considered to have been achieved efficiently. However, the prevention-related and the community-related goals have been evaluated to have low achievement. Dissatisfaction has been expressed for not receiving as much technical support and permanent training facilities as needed - until the extent that isolation of each EAIA from the other, has got to a low perception of belonging to the same overall program. Different teams seem to have developed different ways of working and each of them is proud of the results - but experiences have not been shared and debated, and common knowledge has not been enough constructed. The study underscores that taking this point seriously maybe critical for the overall Program in the future, in order to take positive advantage of the capacities and opportunities of the accumulated experience.