Exploring the impact of pre-proceedings meetings in the Northern Health and Social Care Trust
type: CreativeWork
description: Introduced in Northern Ireland in 2009, The Guide to Case Management in Public Law Proceedings, (DHSS, 2009) provided an operational framework for stakeholders working within, and on the margins, of the public law forum. The Guide introduced an operational scaffolding, intended to address the issue of delay in the carriage of public law applications by focusing upon core areas of concern and assessment activity carried out in the pre-proceedings period. This study presents findings of a mixed methods approach to exploring the impact of pre-proceedings meetings in one of Northern Ireland’s Health and Social Care Trusts. The aim of this study was to develop an understanding of the broad range of factors underpinning social work activity in the pre-proceedings forum, the biographical contexts within which families are engaged in pre-proceedings interventions and the extent to which pre-proceedings meetings were delivering upon their intended aim of obviating the requirement for proceedings and curtailing the duration of public law applications. Retrospective case file analysis was carried out to determine the socio-biographical features and case management trajectories of 30 families who had been invited to attend pre-proceedings meetings between April 2014 and April 2015. This quantitative appraisal of operational activity was complimented by a series of 16 semi-structured interviews involving social work practitioners. The nascent awareness of multiplicity as a trope for contextualising social disadvantage and childhood adversity, (Valentine 2016) is glimpsed in the findings. A picture emerges of pre-proceedings meetings being enacted in response to emerging crises and as an aide to engaging with highly resistant family, (Fauth et al., 2010) as opposed to being employed in a systematic and consistent manner. As a consequence those children considered at pre-proceedings meetings had frequently been exposed to multiple sources of adversity, punctuated by episodes of so…
abstract: Introduced in Northern Ireland in 2009, The Guide to Case Management in Public Law Proceedings, (DHSS, 2009) provided an operational framework for stakeholders working within, and on the margins, of the public law forum. The Guide introduced an operational scaffolding, intended to address the issue of delay in the carriage of public law applications by focusing upon core areas of concern and assessment activity carried out in the pre-proceedings period. This study presents findings of a mixed methods approach to exploring the impact of pre-proceedings meetings in one of Northern Ireland’s Health and Social Care Trusts. The aim of this study was to develop an understanding of the broad range of factors underpinning social work activity in the pre-proceedings forum, the biographical contexts within which families are engaged in pre-proceedings interventions and the extent to which pre-proceedings meetings were delivering upon their intended aim of obviating the requirement for proceedings and curtailing the duration of public law applications. Retrospective case file analysis was carried out to determine the socio-biographical features and case management trajectories of 30 families who had been invited to attend pre-proceedings meetings between April 2014 and April 2015. This quantitative appraisal of operational activity was complimented by a series of 16 semi-structured interviews involving social work practitioners. The nascent awareness of multiplicity as a trope for contextualising social disadvantage and childhood adversity, (Valentine 2016) is glimpsed in the findings. A picture emerges of pre-proceedings meetings being enacted in response to emerging crises and as an aide to engaging with highly resistant family, (Fauth et al., 2010) as opposed to being employed in a systematic and consistent manner. As a consequence those children considered at pre-proceedings meetings had frequently been exposed to multiple sources of adversity, punctuated by episodes of so…
author: Martin, Oisin
language: eng
keywords: Delay, social work, risk, anxiety, pre-proceedings
date published: 2020-12
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:55:31Z
provider: Queen's University Belfast
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Queen's University Belfast