The family as partner in child mental health care: problem perceptions and challenges to collaboration.

OBJECTIVE The development of the health and social care system has made it increasingly specialized, decentralized and professionalized. Accordingly, demands of efficient approaches to collaboration and integration of services for children, adolescents and their family networks have emerged. The aim of this article is to present and analyze findings from a review of the literature on parents as collaboration partners with professionals. METHOD A literature review was conducted in two databases. A multifaceted model was developed to depict and analyze collaboration complexity. RESULTS Preliminary application of the multifaceted collaboration model suggests that first- and second-order therapy positions have different impact on collaborative relationships. CONCLUSION It is suggested that professionals may want to acknowledge the different impact of first- and second-order positions in interprofessional collaboration involving parents. This may be accomplished by staging a routine requirement for discussion of meta-positions as an introductory theme in the opening stages and as a recurrent theme throughout the collaboration process.