The Value of Reflective Inspections on Complex Care for Children at Risk

Investigations into the tragic death of abused children have shown that services are often carried out by multiple organizations from various sectors. Whereas it is important for children at risk that all these organizations together provide good care, most inspectorates concentrate on one specific sector or organization. Moreover, inspectorates have been criticized for assessing only whether professionals complied with rules rather than assessing outcomes. In reply, various inspectorates in Europe have developed new methods to examine how professionals contribute to outcomes for children at risk. In the Netherlands, a partnership of five inspectorates has developed an instrument that reconstructs children’s itineraries through all the organizations that provided care to them. In this paper, we evaluate the use and the impact of this instrument by analyzing 24 journeys of children through the organizations. According to our findings, the instrument opens up new possibilities for improving the outcomes for children. The instrument allows inspectorates to look more thoroughly into the specificities of practices and to reflect on what good care entails in a particular situation (of a family or municipality). Hence, the inspection’s focus shifts from compliance to national rules to reflection on local practices. This creates new ways of reflecting on outcomes of care for children at risk. Reflective inspection, we claim, also offers a platform for transnational connections between inspectors and professionals in European states to discuss and compare what good care entails for similar target groups or municipalities to get the best outcomes for children at risk in Europe.