Approach to the Audit of Inter-Disciplinary Child Protection Practice D espite the emergence of clinical audit, there has been very little written about the audit of child protection practice, especially on inter-agency aspects of practice. This paper gives an account of an audit carried out under the auspices of an area child protection committee, constructing an audit trail drawn up from all the agencies represented by the committee. In order to gain access to qualitative as well as procedural aspects of practice, it was decided not to use a quantitative methodology. Critical incident analysis was undertaken, based on a time-ordered display, which was applied to a random sample of cases. The audit was eective in revealing a number of serious weaknesses in child protection practice in the agencies under review. The paper concludes by considering the contribution which such an audit and its replication can make to improvements in practice.
Although child protection practice has become increasingly proceduralized and inter-disciplinary in recent years, there is surprisingly little in the literature giving accounts of procedures for auditing compliance with practice protocols. This is particularly true if inter-agency aspects of child protection are taken as the focus of audit. For instance, Sidebotham and Pearce (1997) describe an audit of screening by medical sta for signs of abuse in a hospital accident and emergency department, but this does not include reference to other agencies. This paper describes the methodology and some of the ®ndings of an exercise to audit child protection