Archive

Letter from Belgium.

Rudi Roose reports from Ghent on a networking project aimed at transforming the way youth care is carried out in Flanders by putting the client - not the organisation - centre stage.

The Flemish government is currently reforming youth care. According to the government and care workers, youth care should become more client-centred.

One way of achieving this is through establishing networks: youth care organisations should work together or at least know what other organisations do, how they work, who their clients are, so that the whole of youth care can be made more compatible and more effective.

This new concept of youth care is being implemented in three experimental regions. After a period of "testing", the results of these experiments should be implemented in the whole of youth care in Flanders. One of the main criticisms of this project is the fact that - despite the purpose - the reform mainly deals with organisational questions, rather than with needs of clients. The process is also strongly steered by the government, and leaves little room for input from care workers and clients.

With these criticisms in mind, some other regions started their own projects with financial support from local government. One of these projects is the Network Youth Care Waasland (NYW) - a research project of about 35 organisations in collaboration with the University of Ghent.

This project approaches the reform of youth care from a different angle. It looks to focus mainly on the interaction between organisations, their care workers and clients.

The idea is that a better organised youth care doesn't necessarily stand for better care for the client. We know very little about how clients experience care and whether they believe that care is useful or not. Reorganisations can lead to more satisfied care workers, but does this also lead to more satisfied clients?

The basic assumption of the NYW project is that building a network demands a movement towards a shared perspective: not only on organisational problems but - more importantly - on the purpose of social care itself and the perceived quality of the care of clients. Networking demands a shared commitment towards people in need. This shared commitment is not obvious. Organisations and care workers focus mostly on their own practice and their own clients.

It also demands a shared view on the purpose of care itself. Care workers report growing problems: drugs, psychiatric problems, antisocial behaviour, and so on. The question "should or can youth care solve society's problems?" is not so easily put in focus.

Building networks in youth care should also be guided by the question: "who is the client?" Youth care still mainly concerns questions of adults, rather than questions of children, although the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child should be the cornerstone of this care.

NYW wants to work with these questions, dealing with specific cases of people in need and the practice of care workers, to lay the groundwork for a reorganisation of youth care that not only concerns the interests of organisations, but also focuses on the relation between these interests and those of clients.

Rudi Roose is an ex-social worker in youth care and now teaches at the University of Ghent.

Background

- Belgium, which is legally bi-lingual French and Flemish, covers 30,510 sq km (about one-eighth the size of the UK) and has a population of 10.3 million. About 17.5 per cent of the population are aged between 0-14.

- Ethnic groups: Fleming (58 per cent), Walloon (31 per cent), mixed or other (11 per cent).

- Ghent (Gent) is in Flanders, one of three regions in Belgium (along with Wallonia and Brussels), and is the capital of East Flanders, one of 10 Belgian provinces. The population of Flanders is 5.9 million - about 58 per cent of the total population. The population of Ghent is 224,800 of which 7.3 per cent are unemployed.