Continuing education on children in vulnerable situations: needs and preferences for professionals

Abstract

Continuous training for professionals is a challenge due to the need to keep people up to date in a constantly changing environment. This challenge is even greater when dealing with children in vulnerable situations because it affects their rights and it is essential to comply with international treaties also ratified by Spain, as well as with specific state and local community regulations. The text we present is part of a wider research, related to the study of needs and preferences of the group of professionals, belonging to different entities of the third sector of social action (foundations, associations, cooperatives, etc.), which develop the CaixaProinfancia Program in the Region of Murcia. The method used, with a quantitative approach, was the consultation of professionals who developed the PCPI, a non-experimental, descriptive or exploratory, survey-type research, with a theoretical framework based on a human rights approach. A total of 224 professionals participated in the survey, who were part of the PCPI in the RM, during the 2019-2020 academic year. The results showed the lack of training of this professional group in the knowledge of risk situations for children, related legislation, and autonomic protocol. It is concluded that there is an urgent need to articulate continuous training plans that integrate specific theoretical and practical contents on these issues, so that all the people professionally linked to the aforementioned program have the capacity to know how to detect situations of risk for children, as well as the regional protocol to be followed, if applicable.