Service co-ordination: A successful model for the delivery of multi-professional services to children with complex needs

Multiple agencies and professions provide services to children with complex needs but there is a need for such services to be well coordinated. A multi-agency approach to achieving greater co-ordination of services was developed in the city of Leicester and the counties of Leicestershire and Rutland. The project introduced regular planning meetings with families and agreed that parents would hold the multi-agency family service plans and records, and that families themselves, if they wished, could act as co-ordinators for their child.

A study was devised to test whether the aims of the project had been achieved. It was based on individual and group inteviews with parents and professionals, and examined the experiences and perceptions of services co-ordination among paricipants.

The aims of the project proved to be similar to six crucial elements of key working devised by Mukherjee et al. (1999). Both agreed that parents and professionals should have equal status, value and influence, and parents were perceived as important partners. The comments from parents and professionals taking part in the project indicated their satisfaction with the way the new scheme worked, which confirmed for the researchers that the aims had been achieved. Recommendations are made for future models of service co-ordination.