INTERVENTIONS AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

Interventions and Professional Practice

Interventions and Professional Practice

Community Placement

Community Placement is any unpaid, volunteer work experience or service with community-based agencies (not-for-profit or government), or with our in-house Food and Clothing and Public Services projects which are directly supervised by Ontario Works staff). Placement opportunities are available to families receiving financial assistance through the Ontario Works Act, as well as the Ontario Disability Support Program.

Involvement in Community Placement provides participants with an opportunity to give to their community. It also provides an opportunity to structure their time, working and networking with others in a variety of activities to achieve a sense of accomplishment, of being a valued member of the community. Placement offers participants opportunities to make use of and enhance their knowledge and skills. Placement may lead to paid work as placement enhances their self confidence; provides knowledge, skills and experience towards a chosen career; develops contacts within the community; and may even provide referrals to and references for prospective employers.

Background of the Case Study

You are on a community placement within Children's/Child and Family services. You are given the following information on a referral to the service, and asked to consider planning and leading the intervention. The Community Paediatrician has sent the same referral information to both Social Services and Occupational Therapy.

In the case of Mr and Mrs Wilson who have 2 children, Josie aged 11 and Robert aged 15, where the case needs specific analysis for Josie, I will suggest the following practices.

Great Britain has chosen to alter its traditional practice of placing nearly all adolescents term requiring out-of-home care in institutions. Looking at Sweden as a model, the Wilson Family Placement Project sought to keep adolescents in the community. Some of the innovative components are described: families are paid a professional fee, there is a support group for families and contracts are drawn up between the adolescent and foster family specifying desired goals for the duration of the placement. Results of the five year experimental project are provided.

Thorpe's studies (1980) demonstrate the key role of social workers in recommending placements in penal or other establishments, even though it may be the judge or magistrate who actually makes the order. He estimates that 89% of the children he studied, who were made the subject of care orders, did not require residential care, there being no reason why they should not live in the community.

Very gradually, in England, Intermediate Treatment2 is beginning to develop ways of maintaining boys and girls in the community, but the vast majority of troubled and troublesome adolescents are still admitted to residential care as a first resort in spite of ever-increasing evidence that this form of care is counterproductive and very expensive. For example, Clarke and Cornish (1975) have shown that a community home with education for delinquent boys, whether it employs a structured or a therapeutic community type of regime, has a reconviction rate over 3 years of between 65% and 75%, and only provides lusting benefit for about 20% of those ...