Purpose

To define presenting problems, describe how to get more details about presenting problems.

What are they?

The Presenting Problems are the ones the young person, or members of their FamilyInformalNetworkMembers or ProfessionalNetworkMembers bring to you for help.

When you use the AIM assessment you may find that there are particular Key Problems, which one would expect to be amongst the main problems presented.

Details to ask about

• How long the problem has been around?
• How did it start (did it arise suddenly, or "creep up on us"?)

Ask the young person "Can you rewind the DVD of your life to a point before the problem was there? If we could watch at that time what would we see? How would we we see the problem starting to show itself?"

• Is it getting worse, or getting better?
• Consider WHOSE problem is this (sometimes a problem for one person is experienced as a pleasure for another - such as teenage substance misuse)
• Do other FamilyInformalNetworkMembers or ProfessionalNetworkMembers share the same understanding about this problem?
• If not, what are the other understandings?
• Use the Dis-integration grid to explore this if required.
• Ask whether this problem would count as one of the Key Problems for this young person/family.

ICR

Note: If you are using the manual to case record (ICR), then document the Presenting Problems via Make or View Client Notes, recording each individual problem. You can and use Tags to cross reference these other themes. If you go to KeyProblems (note there is no space between the two words in order to distinguish this Tag) you will find all the problems you have identified as Key Problems listed as sub-topics in the "Show Related Information" section.