University news

Two Glasgow psychiatrists are to trial an American adoption system designed to reduce the number of years maltreated children under five-years-of-age spend in care. 

As legislation in Scotland stands, children are placed in temporary foster care while efforts are made to help parents address problems such as drug misuse or mental health problems which contribute to maltreatment of children.

If these interventions and efforts to build parenting skills are successful, the child might be returned home. However, when the best endeavours fail, many of these children come back into care and can spend years going back and forth between their birth family and foster care.  

The American system however, sees to it that when a maltreated child under the age of five comes into foster care, decisions regarding the child’s future are taken much more quickly.

Under the Adoption and Safe Families Act temporary foster care does not exist. Foster carers are jointly registered as adoptee parents making the transition from foster care to adoption quicker and potentially less traumatic for the children in question. Moreover if a child is in care for 15 out of 22 months then authorities have to make a decision on a permanent placement for that child.

Dr Helen Minnis, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at the University, and Dr Graham Bryce, of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, now plan to test the American model in Glasgow and research its effects.

The experts believe the US system, which they studied at work in New Orleans, could radically transform the lives of maltreated children and their families in Scotland.

It is hoped that the trial will get underway later this year in two children and family intervention projects in the east and west end of Glasgow.

Dr Minnis said the evidence was now clear that the experience of "yo-yoing" between a neglectful or abusive home and temporary foster placements can be "devastating for children' development", with life-long effects on mental and physical health rooted in the impact of these early adverse experiences on their developing brains.

"In New Orleans, when a maltreated child under the age of five comes into foster care there is a detailed assessment of the child's health and development and, critically, of all of the child's relationships with parents and other key caregivers," explained Dr Minnis, who is based at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children at Yorkhill.

"This is followed by an intensive intervention aimed at giving the birth family the best chance of building safe, nurturing relationships and having their child returned to their care."

Dr Bryce added: "Professor Zeanah of the University of Tulane, who has pioneered this model and researched it extensively, has shown that with this intervention more children are adopted in the early years and, where children are returned to their birth families, those families are transformed such that the risk of further maltreatment of that child or even of subsequent siblings is greatly reduced."

Matt Forde, Head of Children's Services in West Glasgow CHCP, is working with Dr Minnis and Dr Bryce to establish a Glasgow version of the system. He said:  "The implications of this pilot may be significant for child protection practice in Scotland. It will mean close team working with clinical staff and Social Work professionals. It maximises the input of our most highly specialised and trained children's services staff for children in the child protection system."

Both psychiatrists recently visited a number of projects in Europe and the US as part of Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowships. They examined Professor Zeanah’s work in New Orleans late last year.

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For more media information please contact, Eleanor Cowie, Media Relations Officer at University of Glasgow on 0141 330 3683 or e.cowie@admin.gla.ac.uk

First published: 5 February 2010