Our former Policy Advocacy Lead, Joyce Chia, takes a look at the work we have been doing around families and the child protection system.
What are the opportunities for health justice partnership to improve service responsiveness to the needs of children and families interacting with the child care and protection systems? Can health justice partnership help to shift the focus from identifying risk and removing children from it, to addressing the health and legal issues that underpin those identified risks?
These are just some of the big questions that I’m looking forward to tackling in my new role in the policy and advocacy work of Health Justice Australia. Fortunately for me, Health Justice Australia convened a roundtable of health justice practitioners in October 2021, just before I started, precisely to explore these big questions.
Along with our own roundtable, there are also the Federal Government’s recently launched National Children’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy and National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children. So, especially in a policy context, it’s a great time to be asking these questions!
Importantly for health justice partnerships, the National Framework identifies priorities for action. These include: ‘developing multidisciplinary models that work for families with multiple and complex needs’; ‘strengthening the interface between child and family services’ and other services, including health and justice; and ‘delivering and expanding services that are shown to work’. It’s hard not to see the opportunities in those lines for health justice partnerships!
Where does health justice partnership fit in?
So, what do we know about the role and potential for health justice partnerships in caring for and protecting children? From our census of the health justice landscape, we know that almost 30% of health justice partnerships respond to child care and protection issues in their work. From our roundtable, we heard powerful stories about the potential of health justice partnerships in this area. Practitioners told us that health justice partnerships, by providing a safe and trusted route to legal help, meant that people could get earlier access to legal advice and help to find safe and supported solutions to the problems that create or contribute to child protection concerns, such as alcohol and other drug use or housing security.
They also told us how this approach could lend itself to a genuine partnership around the rights of the child. One practitioner spoke of how the specialist child support worker that was introduced into their health justice partnership had enabled them to put ‘children at the centre’ while the partnership continued to protect legal privilege and the rights of the adult.
Changing mindsets and cultures
A benefit that was perhaps less obvious to me, at the start of my journey with Health Justice Australia, was that, by bringing together practitioners from different service systems around a shared objective, health justice partnerships could shift mindsets and cultures so that practitioners made different decisions. It’s an insight that you instantly recognise once it’s brought to your attention if you’ve ever worked with or across other systems, but it’s easy to miss because too often these mindsets or cultures are not named or examined.
This was brought home powerfully in the roundtable by the example given by one health justice partnership. Before the partnership was established, health staff regarded the lawyer acting for the child’s parent as not caring about the child’s safety, while the lawyer viewed the health staff as not caring about the rights of the parent. Over time, as the partnership developed, they began to understand their different but equally valid perspectives. As a result, the health team started to engage the legal partner much earlier in their interactions with families who were (or were at risk of) interacting with the child protection agency, helping them to identify risk factors long before child protection concerns arose.
With the scandalous over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care, it’s not hard to see the potential for these kinds of partnerships to provide more effective responses for First Nations children, especially where they are led by Aboriginal community-controlled organisations. Addressing this over-representation is, quite rightly, a key policy priority under both Closing the Gap and the National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children. This could and should open up opportunities, both at a policy and practice level, to explore this potential further.
Time for systemic change
While the roundtable identified real potential for strengthening the role of health justice partnerships further, it also helped us start to identify what needs to change at a systems level to fulfil that potential. The lack of funding is an obvious roadblock, as we’re not aware of any service that is funded specifically for this partnership work. Practitioners at the roundtable also told us that the lack of child-centred support workers across the system is another challenge. Further, there’s a need to improve the options for early support, and access to other services such as housing, alcohol and other drug treatments or mental health support to respond to child protection needs.
So, what is Health Justice Australia going to do to move this forward? We’re going to start by making clear what the opportunities are for health justice partnerships to address the underlying health and legal problems that are often the basis of identified risks and child protection concerns. We’re also keen to hear more from health justice practitioners and services, including those who didn’t attend the roundtable, about the work they’re doing and the opportunities and challenges they see in this work. We’re scoping out an event to share that practice knowledge, which will help inform us and the decision-makers we engage with. Then together we can, as the National Framework puts it, help children and young people ‘reach their full potential by growing up safe and supported, free from harm and neglect’.
