Despite the emphasis within Australian child protection upon family-based care as the preferred placement option, it has been increasingly recognised that some young people may be best served in specialist care placements, such as residential or therapeutic care. This paper presents a thematic analysis of 20 interviews undertaken with professional carers who, at the time, were working in a specialist care programme in South Australia known as Individual Packages of Care. The analysis suggests that three key issues were at stake for participants: (1) the impact of role conflict between engaging in caring relationships with young people and maintaining professional boundaries; (2) the impact of additional stakeholders (such as mental health professionals) upon the stability of the placement; and (3) the use of restraint as a form of behaviour management. The paper concludes by discussing the interesting relationship identified in the data between caring relationships and the use of restraint, and makes recommendations from the data for issues requiring further consideration with regard to specialist care placements.

The aim of this study was to explore the role that professional foster care – and specifically Individual Packages of Care (IPC) in South Australia – plays in providing an alternative care option for young people who are unable to live with their birth parents due to issues of abuse or neglect, but who also, due to behavioural concerns, are not well suited to a traditional foster care placement. Participants in the study were nine young people who had previously lived in an IPC placement. The findings highlight participants’ experiences of living in the context of an IPC placement, experiences that were at times challenging, but which also provided opportunities for growth and positive change that may not have been possible in a traditional foster care placement.

To prepare the care system for a rising population of older people, it is important to understand what factors predict the use of care. This paper reports a study of transitions in the use of informal and professional care using Andersen-Newman models of the predictive predisposing, enabling and need factors. The study has drawn on Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam (LASA) data on the use of care and the contextual factors. The data were collected at three-yearly intervals from a random, sex- and age-stratified, population-based sample of adults aged 55–85 years. In summary, the findings for those who initially did not receive care were that almost one-third received some kind of care three years later, most of which was provided by informal care-givers. Need factors were important predictors of most transitions in care, and predisposing and enabling factors, such as age, partner status and income, also played a role. On the relationship between informal and professional care, evidence was found for both ‘compensatory processes’, i.e. informal care substitutes for professional care, and ‘bridging processes’, i.e. informal care facilitates professional care. In view of the increasing discrepancy between the demand for professional care and its supply, the significant impact of predisposing and enabling factors offers opportunities for intervention.