Recently in New content Category

• the meaning of "regulated activity" with children (the type of activity controlled by the Act),
• what employers need to do to comply with the Act (in terms of checking workers and making referrals to the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) where a worker has been, for example, dismissed),
• the personal obligations of social workers, and others working with children, to become 'ISA-registered'."

CC Inform has now introduced a new Fortnightly Focus Newsletter, which will be emailed to you every other Wednesday. This is our chance to let you know what we've been upto, what articles people are looking at and what is coming soon.

For the time being, 'What's new?' will reflect the recent Fortnightly Focus updates.

Just published:

Research review on child protection in sport

Guide to working with people affected by eating disorders

Reference manual on safeguarding disabled children

Coming soon:

Reference manual on disabled children and NSF standards

A guide to assessing the emotional harm experiences by children exposed to domestic violence from a domestically violent parent/ carer

Reference manual on fostering children in contact with the youth justice system

We have a steady stream of content coming in at the moment, so make sure you have your email alerts set up to let you know when new content is published.

Instructions:

• Select: My updates (left hand navigation bar)
• Add email alert
• Rename title to suit the criteria i.e 'Adoption'; 'all content'; 'Domestic violence'
• Select article type: you have an option to select all
• Select article Subject: you have an option to select all
• Submit

Emails are generated and sent to your inbox at 2am, ready to notify you when you walk into the office the following day.

Articles published this week:

Reference manuals:

• Private fostering
  

Research reviews:

• Child contact in the context of divorce and separation: A research review
• Forced marriage
  

Guide to:

• The Child Abuse Investigation Command policing plan for 2008/2009
• What to expect from the court process - A guide for professionals

We have a few reference manuals due to be published shortly (within the next couple of weeks). These include:

• Intercountry adoption
• Institutional abuse
• Age Assessments

Also, look out for the research review on child protection in sport, due to be published this week.

CC Inform would like to introduce, Gary Brigden, our new webmaster to the CC Inform team. Gary will be involved with all things "techy" so if you have any ideas for developing the site, please send us your feedback! 

Gary until now, has worked on communitycare.co.uk, his new role will see him exapnding his role to include the development of CC Inform.  

A year on from our fledgling pilot launch, CC Inform has grown considerably. We have received positive feedback from CCI users and are busy introducing the site to local authorities across England and Wales.  

Over recent months, we have published:  

Reference manuals:

• Placement of children for adoption
• Teenage pregnancy
• Access to records for adopted people (pre-commencement regulations)
• Intermediary services (adoption)

Guides:

• Guide to anger management in children and young people
• Guide to fetal alcohol spectrum disorders
• Guide to bipolar disorder
• Guide to play therapy
• Guide to assessing and supporting non-abusing carer(s) in circumstances of reported sexual abuse committed by an adult in the family

Soon to be published:

• Private fostering
• Supporting children with learning disabilities through their life stages, including transition

The guide to PLO was also updated in April after publication in January 2008 on the site. so it's as up-to-date as possible.

Time is certainly flying by on the Inform desk, as we move into March 2008, we are delighted to see the service expanding week on week.

Gary Vaux, Hertfordshire Council’s welfare rights officer, has updated the A-Z benefits section this week. In this update, you will now find the amounts payable for each benefit. This has come as a direct result of feedback from Inform users! We are listening to your views and want to tailor this service as best we can to meet your work needs.

We are now back on track with loading case law summaries in partnership with our legal publisher Lexis Nexis. We’ve loaded 80 case summaries over the past couple of weeks taking the total up to 380. We aim to have the target 500 on the site very soon!

At the beginning of the year we published a guide to the Public Law Outline. This can be found in the legislation section. It has been mentioned in a few training sessions, so I just thought it would be useful to bring to your attention that it is now available on the site. The guide includes: a proposed summary of changes; recommendations from the care proceedings review; the existing protocol – the key changes in relation to the PLO; the case management model template order; what the changes mean for local authorities; what the changes mean for CAFCASS and training arrangements.

We have also loaded lots more content which include:

Reference manuals
- A guide to child and adolescent mental health services
- Child protection in sport
- Children and young people who go missing
- Kinship care

Guide to…
- Lifestory work
- Obesity in children and young people

Research review
- Young runaways

We’re pleased to announce that Katarina Lurvey, from Cafcass York, has won a magnum of champagne! Her name was picked at random from the list of Cafcass staff who completed the CCInform online feedback survey.

It’s been an exciting start to the new year. The content on the site is growing by the week and we are busy responding to your suggestions by commissioning more articles.

Over the last week, we have published 4 reference manuals:
• Child neglect
• Emotional abuse
• Medical examination of children for the purposes of child protection enquiries
• Phyiscal abuse

And 2 guide tos…
• Guide to obesity in children and young people
• Guide to the Public Law Outline

CCInform has had a really positive year, thank you to everyone who has piloted the site over the summer months and to CAFCASS and the Met who are piloting the service at the moment.

We are really looking forward to 2008 and watching the website reach its full potential, offering users a one-stop-shop for all your information needs.

We have now added a new "guide to..." tab to the main content types. This is a really great development, and will serve as another level of practical guidance for pratitioners in their working lives.

Over the past couple of weeks we have published:

Reference Manuals:
- Information sharing and data protection
- Interviewing children for the purposes of child protection investigations

Guide to...:
- Guide to depression
- Guide to therapeutic assistance for children and young people recovering from sexual abuse
- Guide to working with gangs and other delinquent groups
- The impact of loss and bereavement on children

Research review:
- Breastfeeding and substance misuse
- Females who sexually abuse children and young people

From all of us on the CCInform team, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Inform is slowly, but surely establishing itself among many of the local authorities across England.

Over the coming months, we will be visiting all local authorities who have signed up to Inform to train users on how the content is displayed and what you can expect to find on the site.

It is a really great chance for us to get your feedback.

Many thanks to everyone who has attended training sessions already. For CAFCASS users piloting the service, many thanks for volunteering to use the site. You will have access til mid-December. Please use it as much as possible, to really get the true value of Inform in your working lives.

Content is rolling in, this week we have published:

Reference manuals:
- Child contact in family proceedings: policy, practice, the law and the role of mediation (found in the Family support browse reference manuals menu)
- Domestic violence: financial support

Research reviews:
- Females who sexually abuse children and young people
- Neglect
- Safeguarding children and young people
- Sexual exploitation and abuse through prostitution
- The impact of child sexual abuse

Guide to: (found in the practice section)
- Conflict resolution
- Complaints against social workers

The following reference manuals will be published shortly, they first need to be peer reviewed and legal checked:
- Physical abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Neglect (revised)
- Children sexually exploited through prostitution

We have been busy loading author biographies onto the "sources" page (on the left-hand navigation bar), this is a useful page to keep you informed with who is writing each article published on the site.

Remember to let us know what you would like to see on the site!

You’ll be pleased to hear we have made a lot of progress this week loading content.

Reference manuals:
• Disabled children – multi-agency family support
• Safeguarding in Education
• Safeguarding in Health

Guides to:
• Common Assessment Framework
• Conduct disorder
• Self-harm
• Young people and sexual health

The guides to are really coming along. We have commissioned in excess of 40 guides as a result of feedback from local authority pilots. We are in the process of commissioning many more, so if there is subject you would like us to focus on, please contact us with details.

Feedback from Inform users this week has suggested you would like more information on multi-agency risk assessment conferencing (MARACS) and Stockholm syndrome in domestic violence cases. We are looking into this for you, and will let you know when these are commissioned.

Due to the success of these guides, we are in the process of adding a tab to the content types, at the top of the search results page, to accommodate these articles.

Rest assured this will not impact on our long-term goal of adding a tab to direct you to your individual local authority procedures.

Inform is still very much in it’s infancy and we really appreciate all the feedback that is steadily streaming in from local authority users.

You may have noticed Community Care magazine re-launched the magazine earlier in the year, and as a result changed some of their content. We are now able to publish the new Research Realities and Proven Practice articles in the Inform practice section.

Research Realities looks at the latest research findings on social care analysed by a team of researchers.

Proven Practice provides information about evidence-informed social care practice, it looks at the latest evidence underpinning practice across all social care subject areas.

Look out for both types of article alongside the risk factor, practice panel and expert articles that are regularly published on the site.

We are making good progress with the “guides to…” section of the site (also found in the practice section for the time being). We have recently published a guide to teenage pregnancy; sexually transmitted disease/infections and a guide to street drugs.

You may wonder why we commissioned a guide to street drugs. This arose from a conversation with a piloteer during a feedback session. The social worker explained to us that when they have to work with family members who substance misuse, they need to be aware of the effects different types of drugs have on the individual. They also need to have an idea of how much different types of drugs actually cost. This is important as it provides the social worker with a rough idea of what the drugs cost the parent on a daily/weekly basis and the financial implications this has on the family.

More content is expected to be loaded this week, look out for the series of reference manuals; guides to and research review on safeguarding.