Coordinated Care for Children: Enchancing Quality in Health and Welfare Services to Families with Disabled Children (CoCare)

How can the child coordinator scheme contribute to improved quality and coordination of health and welfare services for families with children with disabilities?

For families with disabled children, well-functioning and well-coordinated services are essential for managing everyday life. CoCare closely follows the child coordinator scheme in order to understand how it actually works in practice – and what is needed to make it work better.

In the project, an interdisciplinary research team from OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University, The Norwegian Institute of Public Health, and Nord University collaborates with four municipalities and city districts (Bodø, Frogner, Lillestrøm, and Rælingen), as well as three disability organizations (the Norwegian Federation of Organizations of Persons with Disabilities, Disabled Children’s Parental Association and the Association of Youth with Disabilibites.

The project addresses four key questions aimed at generating new knowledge and concrete proposals for improvement:

1. What is the uptake of the child coordinator scheme, and does it vary according to socio-economic status, immigrant background and/or geographic location?
2. To what extent does being assigned a child coordinator enhance access to other municipal health and care services?
3. From the perspectives of the involved actors, which factors constrain and enable the child coordinator scheme’s ambition to coordinate the overall services offered to families with disabled children?
4. Which novel theoretical insights, policy recommendations, and educational recommendations can be developed based on updated knowledge of the child coordinator scheme?

By combining registry data, interviews, fieldwork, and case studies, CoCare aims to identify practices that can strengthen the child coordinator scheme both locally and nationally – and contribute to better services for families who need long-term support.