At the time of completing this book (June 2020), most of the world is gripped by the coronavirus pandemic, with various regimes of lockdown, quarantine, social distancing, isolation and closure. The multi-agency meetings we have studied in this book are likely to have taken on new forms as the world – and health and social care – come to terms with this new reality. We quoted Hughes et al (2011, p 136) in Chapter 2, that the practice of meetings that are ‘face-to-face … in close proximity’ would not comply with current social distancing requirements. Yet most of these meetings are essential for the everyday work of social welfare professionals and are consequential for the lives of service users.

We do not know what multi-agency meetings look like at the moment. There seems to be a variety of responses between different countries and settings. It is likely that most of the meetings we observed have been postponed, scaled back or are taking place virtually, although there are some reports of plans to organise meetings with social distancing restrictions (Turner, 2020b). For example, we understand that the rehabilitation meetings described in Chapter 3 were postponed but are restarting with social distancing. Child welfare meetings (examined in Chapters 4 and 8) are taking place using virtual meeting or teleconference applications, according to official local authority websites in the UK. These websites provide little detail of how virtual meetings currently are being organised. Guidance from the Royal College of Psychiatry in the UK recommends that CPA meetings (examined in Chapter 7) should look at ‘alternative ways of sharing information, such as written feedback or teleconferencing’ (Courtney, 2020, p 3).

We suggest that the themes identified in this book will be relevant in examining these new arrangements. For example, we noted the importance of the ways in which the chair encourages and gives credence to professionals’ and service users’ contributions. However, one local authority in England described (in April 2020) a system of organising multi-agency meetings in which the chair gathers information and opinions from professionals and service users and then makes a decision on future action, with seemingly no discussion between other professionals or service users (posted on 2 April 2020) By September 2020 the system was described as ‘semi-virtual’: