CHARACTERISTICS OF DECISION-MAKING PROCESS IN CHILDREN'S SOCIAL CARE

Interventions in children's social care are based on assessing a series of circumstances relevant for child safety and well-being within the living, usually family, surrounding and on the analysis of information and decisions derived from them. Issuing professional opinions and decisions on intervention in care for children is considered one of the most important tasks in social work and this paper describes difficulties in decision-making as well as the process itself and the types of decisions in child protection. The paper presents specificities of the analytical and the intuitive analysis as well as the importance of the assessment procedure. Since mistakes happen in all professions and indicate the possibilities and needs of improving quality of work, the paper especially focuses on the research of mistakes in child protection resulting from the implementation of the named processes. The consequences of wrong decisions in care for children are almost always far-reaching and sometimes tragic. Therefore, guidelines for improving the decision-making process and issuing professional opinions are provided. One of the important means of more systematic decision-making process and minimising mistakes is establishing a single assessment procedure that will, without disregarding the intuitive traditional approach, be more based on an analytical approach.