Functionality of cooperation between health, welfare and education sectors serving children and families

Introduction Children and their families use a lot of different services, which poses challenges in terms of cooperation between service providers. The purpose of the study was to evaluate and compare the functioning of this cooperation between services for children and families in Finland's mainland municipalities from the viewpoints of employees and managers. Method The study was carried out using a cross-sectional survey design. Data were gathered using two postal surveys from employees and managers working in health care, social welfare and educational settings. The data consisted of responses from 457 employees and 327 managers. Results Employees working in primary health care and education services assessed cooperation as working better than did those working in social welfare, special health care or mental health and substance abuse services. Well-functioning cooperation at the operational and strategic level was related to good awareness of services and to agreed and well-functioning cooperation practices with few barriers to cooperation. Employees were more critical than managers concerning the occurrence of barriers and about the agreed cooperation practices. Conclusions Successful cooperation in providing services for children and families requires an awareness of services, management structures that support cooperation, agreed practices and efforts to overcome barriers to cooperation.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  International Journal of Integrated Care

• Publication date

  2013-12-02

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Medicine, Business, Education

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.5334/IJIC.1070PMID 24363637PMCID 3864128
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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