Running a team for disabled children & their families - Martin F Robards

Children with multiple disabilities and complex neurological problems, often compounded by psychological and behavioural difficulties, need a care provision beyond the normal community and hospital paediatric services. These children, and their families, need the help of a variety of specialists. Organising these is a complex problem and there is a constant risk of the family's needs being overridden by the professionals' convenience. Dr Robards describes ways of providing all the necessary specialisms efficiently and at the same time increasing the family's participation and understanding to its optimum level. Case histories bring Dr Robards' proposals into lively focus, and demonstrate in their variety how a rigid structure can never meet these children's needs. It is a very practical book, with clear recommendations about record keeping, the integration of voluntary support groups into the professionals' work, the location and layout of premises used by the professionals and many other factors, often small in themselves, but collectively critical to the efficient and humane delivery of this element of care in the community. Peter Rosenbaum underlines the relevance of the book to clinicians worldwide and says it is 'a challenge to thoughtful practitioners to review what we do, to study variations of these many themes, and to add new knowledge about the how and what of our day-to-day practices'.