OBJECTIVES Despite great needs, many children in foster care do not receive adequate medical care. Suboptimal care may be attributable in part to placement changes, which disrupt continuity of care by both a consistent surrogate parent and potentially a primary care physician. These disruptions in turn may lead to increased use of the emergency department (ED) for outpatient care. The primary a...

Even though federal laws have had a major influence on foster care and child welfare policy for more than 40 years, additional reforms are needed to ensure safe and stable families for children in care. This article describes the complex array of policies that shape federal foster care and observes: A number of federal policies addressing issues such as housing, health care, welfare, social sec...

a r t i c l e i n f o Despite the prominence of attachment theory in international foster care literature and the importance of attachment relationships in successful foster care, attachment theory and practices do not feature prominently in South African foster care research. Against this backdrop, we interviewed twenty South African social workers' about their knowledge of attachment theory a...

OBJECTIVE To compare the continuity of care experienced by children who are in foster care with that of children who are not in foster care and are covered under Medicaid managed care and Medicaid fee-for-service (FFS). METHODS This retrospective cohort study used Medicaid claims/encounter data from Washington state. A total of 903 children who were in foster care and continuously enrolled in...

Overview Every year, public agencies place a substantial number of children in foster care after child welfare officials have determined that the parents of these children are either unable or unwilling to care for them. Most of these children are placed in foster homes, either with relatives (“kinship” care) or under the care of unrelated adults in family foster homes. Many of these children s...

Foster care placement is among the most tragic events a child can experience because it more often than not implies that a child has experienced or is at very high risk of experiencing abuse or neglect serious enough to warrant state intervention. Yet it is unclear how many children will experience foster care placement at some point between birth and age 18. Using synthetic cohort life tables ...

High-quality foster placements can help a foster-child to thrive and can counter some of the risk factors normally associated with being a foster-child. Unfortunately, demand for foster-carers has been outstripping supply. The present study sought to identify the characteristics of people who have high potential to become a foster-carer. A large, representative sample from the general populatio...

Breakdown of foster care has been defined as the situation in which one of the involved parties terminates the intervention before having achieved the goals established for the case plan. This work presents a study carried out with a Spanish sample of 318 closed cases of children who were placed in foster homes and kinship care. The data were collected through the exhaustive review of the child...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the prevalence of stereotypies in children with a history of early institutional care, evaluate the efficacy of a foster care intervention compared with institutional care on the course of stereotypies, and describe correlates in language, cognition, and anxiety for children who exhibit stereotypies. DESIGN Randomized controlled trial. SETTING Institutions in Bucha...