Helping Carers Helping Kids podcast series for foster carers
Being heard: how carers are informing child protection policies and processes
Helping Carers Helping Kids podcast series for foster carers1
Being heard: how carers are informing child protection policies and processes
Being heard: how carers are informing child protection policies and processesis one of 11 podcasts in the podcast series, Helping Carers Helping Kids. This podcast series provides additional information and insights on a range of topics to help foster carers in their important role.
In this podcast you will hear from Leigh Hillman of the Foster Care Association of Victoria who informs us of the new carer advisory groups currently running across Victoria.
The podcasts are hosted by writer, producer and comedian Brian Nankervis, who you might know from the SBS music trivia game show RocKwiz.
The podcasts can be accessed at care. Below is the transcript of this podcast.
Brian Nankervis
We acknowledge the Aboriginal people of Victoria, the first nations upon whose land this podcast was produced.We pay respects to elders across Victoria and Australia, both past and present.Hello, welcome to Helping Carers Helping Kids.I'm Brian Nankervis and today we'll be hearing from Leigh Hillman of the Foster Care Association of Victoria about new forums that have been established to engage with carers.
This podcast is part of a series produced by the Victorian Government to support foster carers in their important role.
Leigh Hillman
I'm Leigh Hillman from the Foster Care Association of Victoria.FCAV has been instrumental in the establishment of the carer advisory groups in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services.The advisory groups are a really exciting initiative, and FCAV is so pleased that the minister didn't just hear the voice of carers, but listened to their concerns and acted on carers’ express desire to be active participants in her department’s reforms of the out-of-home care system.
With meetings held four times a year, across the north, south, east and west divisions of the department across Victoria, the advisory groups give carers a place at the table with agencies and the department to constructively address a wide range of long-standing issues.They give carers access to the most senior departmental staff in each division, such as the child protection directors, and those staff have undertaken to ensure that carer concerns are addressed through improved practice by child protection workers and consistent policy and procedural applications.
The carer advisory groups provide carers with a direct line to the senior management of Victoria's foster care agencies, who can take home carers’ concerns and implement the changes carers want to see in the approaches to one of the most important adult partnerships in a child or young person's life in out-of-home care.
Already, carers are highlighting the issues and the opportunities to achieve continual improvement in the delivery of out-of-home care in Victoria.State-wide issues regarding consistent approaches across all departmental divisions and foster care agencies. Local settings where new ideas and initiatives can be tested and implemented.
Empowerment is a sometimes hackneyed term these days, but the carer advisory groups enable a far stronger sense of collaboration between carers, agencies and the department.With carer membership set at 18 month terms, the groups will remain contemporary and fresh thinking in their approaches and solutions over the coming years.The opportunity to develop a shared understanding of the challenges of foster care, through the advisory groups is invaluable.It opens windows of opportunity for carers to truly be a voice for the children and young people for whom they care and to affect change for the better, where carers are respected as equals in the partnerships that are so essential, to make out-of-home care a viable and a positive experience for some of Victoria's most marginalised kids.
More information about the care advisory groups is available at the Foster Care Association of Victoria website at
Brian Nankervis
This podcast is part of a series produced by the Victorian government to support foster carers in their important role.Thank you for listening.
To receive this publication in an accessible format phone 03 9096 7366, using the National Relay Service 13 36 77 if required.Authorised and published by the Victorian Government, 1 Treasury Place, Melbourne.
© State of Victoria, Department of Health and Human ServicesSeptember 2016.
Where the term ‘Aboriginal’ is used it refers to both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Indigenous is retained when it is part of the title of a report, program or quotation.
ISBN 978-0-7311-7062-3 (pdf/online)
Available
Being heard: how carers are informing child protection policies and processes
Helping Carers Helping Kids podcast series for foster carers1