title: Encounters with service professionals experienced by children from families with alcohol problems: A qualitative interview study.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The aim of this study was to explore encounters with service professionals experienced in childhood and adolescence by children who grew up with parental alcohol abuse. We focused on their accounts from situations indicating children's struggles or parental drinking problems.
  
  
  METHODS
  Semi-structured qualitative interview study was conducted with retrospective data from nine adults. Systematic text condensation was used to understand childhood experiences from encounters with professionals.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Participants believed that professionals rarely recognised their parents' drinking problems. The children felt abandoned by professionals who must have noticed their struggles. Participants experienced that their appearance or behaviour was ignored and that they were not invited to talk. Professionals taking part in individual family members' problems seemed to avoid subsequent involvement in underlying parental drinking. Even when problems were obvious, participants felt that professionals took no further action. Medical and social problems were managed within very confined perspectives.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Specific commitment to confront cultural taboos is needed to attend to children's unmet needs. Recognising each young person's situation implies not only noticing that something is wrong, but also taking action. Children's experiences of fragmented and confined approaches towards parental drinking problems may be counteracted by better collaboration between teachers, school nurses and GPs.
authors: 1 Health Services Research Unit (HØKH), Akershus University Hospital, Norway.
authors: Anne
authors: A
authors: Werner
authors: 2 Research Unit for General Practice, Uni Research Health, Norway.|3 Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen, Norway.|4 The Research Unit for General Practice and Section of General Practice, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
authors: Kirsti
authors: K
authors: Malterud
keywords: Alcohol abuse; childhood; family; health and social care providers; qualitative interviews