Cooperation and coordination around children with individual plans

Abstract

In this article we discuss the relationship between cooperation and coordination around six children with special needs who attend Norwegian day care centres. The children in focus have ‘individual plans’, in which goals, roles and activities at the centre of the cooperation are documented, and are as such a coordinating device. Each child has a cooperative team consisting of parents, representatives from day care centre, the child's special educator, the public health nurse and, for instance, their physiotherapist, family doctor etc. to support them. The cooperating teams are headed by a coordinator, who in most cases is the public health nurse. Methods used in the study are individual interviews with at least four representatives from each cooperative team, as well as two focus group interviews with representatives from two different specialist units. The research design is action oriented, and involves, in addition to data collection, two seminars with parents and practitioners from the day care centre and social/health sectors. Departing from the empirical findings in the project we discuss how the coordinating practices, such as the individual plan and the designation of coordinators, influence the cooperation in the teams around each child. Our findings indicate that cooperation benefits from a bottom-up process, in which it is the cooperation that structures the coordination, rather than vice versa.

Keywords:

• individual plan
• children with special needs
• day care centre
• cooperation
• coordination
• coordinator role

Acknowledgements

The study on which this article is based was supported by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council. We are grateful to the families, day care centres and representatives from the health and social services agencies for their participation in the investigation. This article would not have been possible without the efforts of a research team composed of the paper's authors and David Lansing Cameron, Anne Dorthe Tveit and Jorunn Midtsundstad from the University of Agder. A preliminary version of the article was presented at the 9^th conference of the European Sociological Association in September 2009.