The lived experiences and perspectives of families receiving integrated social care: A CAIMeR-informed inquiry

Summary
Families with multiple and complex problems often interact with numerous professionals, leading to fragmented care. Integrated social care aims to address this, but there is limited knowledge about effective approaches from families’ perspectives. We studied social-neighborhood teams in Amsterdam Nieuw-West.

Findings
From 31 interviews with 19 participants from 11 families, we used inductive analysis to identify five key themes in families’ experiences with integrated social care: “(dis)trust,” “perspective on the future,” “control and overview,” “self-efficacy,” and “participation.” These themes were illustrated by 16 CAIMeR configurations explaining what works, for whom, and why, such as addressing families’ actual needs, ensuring effective coordination, and promoting active professional involvement in multidisciplinary meetings. The CAIMeR approach provided a structured framework examining the interaction of context, actors, interventions, mechanisms, and results across various family situations. For example, in complex scenarios involving diverse youth care professionals (actor), families face risks to children's safe development (context) and often experience frustration and anger due to perceived neglect of their own needs by social workers and specialized youth care workers (intervention), leading to family members feeling unheard and shutting down (mechanism), resulting in anger and frustration (result).

Applications
When social care focuses mainly on the child, parents tend to feel overlooked and unheard, which harms their relationship with care professionals. Trust between professionals and families is crucial, and effective collaboration among professionals, supported by coordination and active participation in multidisciplinary meetings, contributes to improved outcomes.