♦         Child and youth work general knowledge, skills and abilities e.g. what cyw’s need to know and able to do in the care of children and youth in any setting 

♦         Child and youth work specific knowledge, skills and abilities as they pertain to mental health difficulties that children, youth, and their families experience and the appropriate treatment interventions

♦         Mental health issues in general– the importance of things like assessment, clinical formulation, abnormal development, adult and family issues, medication, evaluation and research, and theoretical perspectives. 

        The Findings

1    New CYW graduates are rarely hired directly into full time positions in children’s mental health programs. Most often they are hired into relief positions as a result of their practicum experience in the agency and from there proceed to a full-time position.

Children’s mental health programs are typically seen as having the most interesting CYW positions at the highest compensation levels so supply and demand suggests that full time permanent positions in these programs are at a premium.  Focus group participants also stated that college placement students in their agencies were natural choices for contract or relief positions (which lead to permanent positions) since they had some mental health training, specifically in the programs in which they completed their placements in, a factor seen as efficient for the agency.  Some regions described collective agreement rules that restricted the hiring practices of managers therefore  new graduates, who showed excellent promise, but had no position within the agency could not be hired.     

2     CYW practitioners are employed in a wide range of services, residential, day treatment, community based, outreach and prevention programs, offered in children’s mental health agencies.

Focus group participants were supervisors of CYW’s in at least one program in their organization, but each organization had several programs that employed CYW’s.  Participants were asked which programs within their organization employed CYW’s. Table One represents an approximation of the number and types of programs that employed CYW’s within the agencies that participated in the focus groups. Most of the organizations represented in the five focus groups had residential programs and/or day treatment programs but very few had addictions or employment programs for youth that employed CYW’s.

Table 1: Programs represented in the Focus Groups

Many of the above programs hired not ONLY CYW’s for the program but also hired a range of professional disciplines, choosing the person who had the right combination of skills for the job. Very often this was a CYW, but it could also be a social worker, a nurse, or a human service worker.

3     Evidence based treatments and practices are being (slowly) introduced into most children’s mental health programs and CYW’s are being expected to be knowledgeable, informed and trained in these treatments and practices.

The issues of evidence-based practice and evidence-based treatments were discussed by focus group participants.  The participants themselves described a wide variation in the practices and treatments that they thought were evidence based. The role of the child and youth work practitioner in providing these treatments or engaging in specific practices also varied widely. 

There were more than twenty different treatments / practices identified by participants as being at some stage of implementation in their mental health programs; including five crisis management programs. Table 2 below lists the practices identified. There was no clear delineation between models of treatment and evidence-based practices and there seemed to be no consensus in the groups about the difference between using a theorists’ ideas and models versus treatments and practices that have been derived from systematic research studies. One can see from the list in Table 2 that participants were often unclear on the meaning of the term evidence based treatment.  Very often they were also unclear on the full name of the program.

Table 2: Participants Descriptions of Evidence Based Treatment/Practice in the Agency

Of interest to us, and likely characteristic of the child and youth care focus in this project, all groups immediately identified one of the government approved behavior management training programs[1] when asked what evidence based treatments were used in the organization. When asked if practitioners OTHER than child and youth care were trained in these procedures most participants replied that they were not but there was a general consensus that agency social workers, prevention workers, and family support workers should receive this training, (the descalation component as a minimum), and some agencies were already doing this in order to build a common language across the organization.

4      There was an acknowledgement of the importance of on-going training and supervision for all practitioners in children’s mental health programs, including CYW’s. 

Training is generally very similar across all disciplines in the agencies; CYW’s are included in most, if not all, clinical training opportunities in the agencies and there are additional specific training programs designed specifically for CYW’s, especially in the area of crisis management and physical restraints. 

Supervision was described as being substantively different for CYW’s as compared to other clinical staff members.  All participants were CYW supervisors and recognized that CYW’s needed support, encouragement, and a clear sense of the ‘use of self’ in relation to their clients, and this was best reviewed in the supervision process.  The differences in supervisory approaches among participants were found in the frequency of supervisory meetings  (from weekly to monthly), and the nature of the connection between the supervision process and formal performance appraisals.  Participants believed that younger, more inexperienced CYW practitioners needed more frequent and intense supervision than those who had been in the field longer; although there was no evidence presented, in any of the groups, that this belief has any foundation in research.

Participants distinguished between clinical supervision and administrative supervision. They also described some peer or group supervision processes in relation to clinical supervision. Overall, a pictured emerged that included the following elements:

• Regular team meetings with a focus on presenting and discussing cases for clinical supervision.  This could be either peer supervision or supervision involving a clinical specialist who was different from the designated line supervisor.
• Regular individual supervisory meetings with a line supervisor which, for child and youth workers included a significant focus on their own awareness of self and use of self in work with the children and youth, as well as ensuring administrative tasks were dealt with.
• Frequent spontaneous consultation with the supervisor, often with a focus on working through the CYW’s self-awareness in order to ensure that their interactions with the children and youth were effective and to facilitate the identification of possible intervention scenarios.  Such consultation could occur “on the floor” in residential programs or by phone or “drop in” visits to the supervisors working in community based and hospital based programs[2].
• Regular note taking of individual supervisory sessions.

5    The personal attributes and general abilities that CYW practitioners brought to the job were more important than the specific training and skills developed through CYW study and practice.  

This point was very prevalent in all focus group discussions.  The participants, although wanting skilled, knowledgeable, competent practitioners, identified that the most significant issue was a high level of competence stemming from a good general education, and having personal philosophies, histories, and the ability to relate and care for others in providing excellent child and youth work services.  The belief was that given this general knowledge and positive attributes then a practitioner could learn and be trained in all other specific areas of professional practice.