PROMOTING INTERAGENCY COLLABORATION IN CHILD SERVICES

Effective collaboration between agencies is often difficult to achieve . Children and their families/carers, who have complex therapeutic nee ds, present particular difficulties in that agencies need to work toge ther, if they are to produce a co-ordinated and integrated package of care. A Multi-Agency-Consultation-Team (MACT) was set up in an attempt to overcome some of these problems of interagency co-operation. This paper describes the protocol, types of children referred and the recom mendations made by the team. Follow-up of these children at 4 months s uggests that a MACT does have a role to play in developing high qualit y services.