Books, booklets & multimedia

Doctors For Children In Public Care - A resource guide advocating, protecting and promoting health

	Price: £10.00	BAAF, 2000 ISBN 978-1-873868-81-2

"Children account for nearly 25 per cent of the population but attract only some 10 per cent of the health care resources. Our health services, additionally, focus mainly on the treatment of illness rather than promotion of good health." Marion Miles, Medical Adviser

Adoption and fostering are principally social services but they are social services with a vital medical component. Children for whom foster carers or adoptive parents are now sought are likely to have complex physical, developmental, emotional and educational needs. Social work practice and the medical skill and experience needed to support and nurture children looked after by the state must be responsive to these children’s needs.

Quality Protects and the new initiatives in social services will increasingly demand the comprehensive assessments of children in the care system. This resource guide for doctors looking after children in public care focuses on promoting good health and wellbeing using a holistic approach and tackles a range of issues that medical advisers to local authority agencies need to be aware of including:

• The health needs of looked after children
• The statutory health needs assessment
• Planning for better health and listening to young people’s views
• Adult health issues including those that are controversial
• The role of primary health care and the GP as medical adviser
• Confidentiality and medical record keeping
• The developing role of the medical adviser in the looked after children system

The second part of this guide contains training exercises that will help doctors and other health professionals to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to help them support children in public care. A Service Specification and Practice Standards for the medical adviser for looked after children is also provided along with various other useful resources.