Acute Team in Youth Psychiatric Services Targeted to the Residential Child Care

 
Many children in vulnerable living environments need psychiatric treatment as well as child protection services. The demand for a closer collaboration between different services is high, but professionals act in separate sectors and thus effective inter-professional networking is difficult to establish.
 
The ACUCARE partnership considered it beneficial for specialists to learn from each other by using the acute teamwork model to help children and adolescents. The project developed vocational e-course trainings for nursing-, social work and social educator students - a new model of interprofessional psychiatric acute teamwork. 
 
The project mapped and reported the needs for interprofessional training and created the e-learning platforms.  The training modules were developed in English and translated into Finnish and Estonian. The project’s main result was the new 10 (5+5) ECTS interprofessional vocational training e-course, including e-learning materials and an e-curriculum manual for the use of different vocational education training organisations.
The e-course consists of two themes:

1. family work in ‘open care’ (5 ECTS) - focus in working within families to promote educational partnership between parents and professionals; to bring together regional family services, such as maternity and child health clinics, early childhood education and care services, school and local family and early support services to help families
2. residential childcare in foster care (5 ECTS) - focus in enhanceing the skills for an integrated care approach; to incorporate the interprofessional expertise and advance the existing child protection and mental health services better 

A literature review about mental health care interventions in child welfare was submitted for wider international readership. Three scientific articles were planned, but the target was too ambitious. One article was published.
 
National implementing the project results was well done by all partners. It was somewhat challenging in Estonia to find relevant training programmes where the developed modules can be integrated, as the childcare responsibilities are divided differently between organisations in Estonia and Finland. The project accomplished a certain familiarity and understanding of different child protection systems and professional cultures in the partner countries.
 
Another objective was to increase mobility and job satisfaction of social and health care workforce and integration of Central Baltic labour market. The possibilities were discussed, and there are lots of similarities, but also differences in professionals’ attitudes to family and its rights and the concept of ‘family’ in Estonia and Finland. It is beneficial for specialists to share experiences and for students to learn about other profession´s competencies.
 
The project used modern information and communication technologies for its work and produced e-learning materials. Project successfully communicated its achievements via presentations in international conferences and by organising seminars for the stakeholders.

ACUCARE Project’s final seminar 2.11.2017 focused on promising interprofessional collaboration practices in psychiatric and child protection sectors in Finland and Estonia.

One course in Estonian can be find here.