Guidance
This guideline covers how organisations, practitioners and carers should work together to deliver high-quality care, stable placements and nurturing relationships for looked-after children and young people. It aims to help these children and young people reach their full potential and have the same opportunities as their peers.
Recommendations
This guideline includes recommendations on:
- supporting positive relationships
- valuing carers
- safeguarding
- health and wellbeing
- learning and education
- transition between care placements and to permanent placements, and out of care to independence
Who is it for?
- Social care, health and education practitioners working with looked-after children and young people and care leavers
- Commissioners and managers, policy makers and providers in the NHS, health and social care, public health and local authorities, and third-sector organisations
- Commissioners, managers and providers of residential accommodation and housing for looked-after children and young people and care leavers
- Looked-after children and young people and care leavers
- Birth parents, carers and prospective adoptive parents of looked-after children and young people
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
NICE worked with Public Health England to develop this guidance.
This guideline updates and replaces NICE guideline PH28 (October 2010).
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
All problems (adverse events) related to a medicine or medical device used for treatment or in a procedure should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency using the Yellow Card Scheme.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.