A Systematic Audit and Evaluation of Archival Assessment Records in a Residential Assessment Service for Children, Adolescents and Families

“Actually we have it all wrong, when we say we look forward to the future. The future is a void and we walk, so as to say, blindly with our backs towards it. At best we see what we have left behind”. (Fritz Perls, 1969). “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” (Richard Rohr, 2003). This work is an evaluation of assessment work completed in my employment setting. I work as Senior Psychologist for Tusla, Child and Family Agency, (formerly Health Service Executive, H.S.E.), in a residential assessment service that provides multi-discipline assessment of children, adolescents, and families for community social work teams, located in counties Cork and Kerry, in the Republic of Ireland. The service was established in 2000. Over the years there have been changes in the landscape of service provision, (in terms of: legislation; service configuration and provision; changes in the personnel of the assessment team, and among referring agents). During the existence of the service, there has been an apparently unlimited range of reasons for referral, with a large number of referrals lacking clear, specifically, stated reasons, (rather being stated in the form of a list, or history of problems within a family unit, ort within a child/adolescent). This mixed methods evaluation examines archival assessment Report records for the first 10 years of service operation. Data have been managed using MaxQDA qualitative analysis software. Quantitative analysis of information about all completed assessments for the first ten years of operation of the service is undertaken, with qualitative content analysis of a smaller sample of electronic records from five selected annual cohorts. I have discussed how findings from the research have supported the design, development, and implementation of a new model for practice within the service.