How Effective Are Integrated Working and Multi-Agency Working?

Integrated working is when different services join together to offer more effective care for babies and young children, where multi-agency working is when different services work together to meet particular needs of babies and young children, along with their parents and/or carers. Multi-agency teams are made up of members of the children’s workforce drawn from a range of different disciplines who met for specific reasons on a regular basis; all the professionals will have joint aims and goals.It is a way that ensures that those children and young people that need additional support will have exactly the right professionals in place for them to be supported in the correct way. The benefits of integrated and multi-agency work are that it enables early identification and intervention of any needs that the children may have, as well as ways to better support their parents and carers. It allows children and their parents to have easier and quicker access to professional’s e xpertise and the services that they offer.With the services all working together it provides a better quality of service and means that children and their parents do not need to repeat themselves to each of the professionals that they work with, instead the professionals will already have the information. Multi-agency work also allows children and their families’ needs to be addressed more appropriately. As the child’s needs are addressed sooner and the correct support is given to them to help with their needs, the child will have an improved achievement and better engagement within education.The use the Common Assessment Framework which allows an early and initial assessment of the child’s needs for any extra services and support, and once this is carried out it will be available for all the services. In practice the professionals will put the needs of the child or young person before those of any one service, and also ensure that the service is inclusive and t hat all children’s basic needs are met. Sutton Hill Children’s Centre ensures that all the professionals within the centre identify children with additional needs at an early stage.They also need to ensure that all the information that they have is shared with all the other professionals and that they work together to provide early intervention and that the child receives the necessary support from specialist services as soon as they are identified as needing it. In the Camden Children’s Fund primary school project the school gets access to additional services which go beyond what is normally available and offers preventive and early intervention approaches to children and their families.The have a best practice approaches in place regarding the identifying and assessing of the child’s needs and then designing interventions for the particular child which will help them to improve. Within the practice at Camden Children’s Fund they are currently fin ding it difficult to allocate enough time to be able to carry out the best practice approach, and are trying to resolve this issue through all the agencies coming together and discussing what the best course of action will be.In conclusion integrated and multi-agency work is very beneficial to the child and their family at identifying any needs that the child may have early and providing appropriate and sufficient support to the child and their family that will help them to deal with any needs and support them with any help they may need in the future. It also brings together a wide range of specialist services that can work together with the family so that nothing needs to be repeated, and the child and their family will get the best out of each of the services that are provided.