The Covid-19 pandemic has had an enormous effect on the efforts to deinstitutionalise alternative care in many countries. The interesting thing is that there have been two main effects, pulling in opposite directions. There does not seem to be a lot of middle ground at the moment.
One of the effects has been mentioned in various blogs over the past couple of months: the sudden fast-tracking of deinstitutionalisation. When lockdown measures were put in place, in various countries (with or without a government mandate) children were sent back to their families – or just shown the door of the institution – from one moment to the next. Without any assessment, preparation, support, or continued monitoring. This is a very dangerous development that can put children at serious risk. Various organisations are scrambling to try to put in place support measures to make sure that these children and their families are alright and will be able to stay together in a safe and positive way.
The other effect is the exact opposite: the instant, complete freezing of the entire deinstitutionalisation process, regardless of the stage it was in. Initially, when no one really knew what to do, what was going on, and how to best keep children and staff safe, this was an understandable reaction. However, after the first shock, it is a bit extreme.
There are cases where a full assessment of the child and the family had been completed, a care plan had been written, preparation of the child and the family was progressing, and everything was in place for the child to go to the family (whether it is reintegration in her own family or placement in a foster family), but because of the pandemic outbreak, everything was put on hold indefinitely. There is no need for this. With proper assessment, preparation and continued monitoring and support, it is definitely in the best interest of the child to be moved out of the institution.
For situations where the move towards placement in a family has not progressed that far yet, it is to be expected that the current situation will lead to delays, but work can continue. When it is not possible to speak to children or families in person, it is usually still possible to communicate by phone or in other ways. Staff working and living with children in an institution can continue the work to do individual assessments of children, to gather the information needed to be able to make an informed decision about what kind of placement would be best for the child. And in a similar way, solutions can be found to still tackle most aspects that need to be dealt with in the process of moving towards family-based alternative care and reintegrating children into their families.
In places where people really feel that they are not able to move forward from the point where they got stuck at the start of the pandemic – which tends to be in places where they were still at a very early stage in the deinstitutionalisation process – I have been advising to hold off on focussing on getting the children out of the institution for the moment, and instead move up a few steps in the process (you can read about all the steps involved in the process of deinstitutionalisation starting with this blog HERE). I advise them to focus on designing and setting up services needed in the community to help families take care of their own children or to create or strengthen a network of existing services in a way that helps them reach the families who need them better.
By focussing on these family strengthening measures, you help prevent more children being separated from their families due to the consequences of the pandemic. So, although you are not moving children out of the institution, you are preventing lots of new children ending up in there. Plus, once you have these services in place for family preservation, they are already there and waiting to be used when you are ready to start moving children back into the community. So at that point in the process, you will save time.
The pandemic and the restrictions imposed because of it very definitely raise very serious challenges to efforts for deinstitutionalisation and child protection. However, ways can be found around it. And we have to make sure – by working together – that the momentum that was building in the move towards family-based alternative care before the pandemic is not completely obliterated. We need to keep moving forward and to keep making sure that more and more children are growing up in families.
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