CRE Newsletter - July 2021
Child and Family Hub update
Our Melbourne-based team have been working in partnership with Wyndham City Council and IPC Health to co-design, test and evaluate an integrated Child and Family Hub model of care for families with children from birth to 8 years living with adversity in Wyndham Vale, Victoria.
Pictured below is the co-located Child and Family Hub workforce which recognises the need to address the biopsychosocial nature of family adversity. Inside the Hub are the practitioners who will be co-located on site at IPC Health. Additional supports and services are shown on the periphery of the Hub with two-way arrows indicating referral into and out of the Hub.
We have completed the 10-week co-design series of workshops with community members and practitioners living and working in Wyndham Vale and an extensive workforce consultation. Pictured below is Tess Hall (Postdoctoral Researcher, MCRI), Sirisha Bikkani (Community Member) and Sharon Phillips (Family Case Manager, MacKillop Family Services). Click here to watch a video about our co-design process and to hear insights from the design team.
The co-designed Hub components include:
· Family and community partnerships: intentional creation and strengthening of connections between the Hub and caregivers, community groups and individuals. These partnerships also involve Hub practitioners working in partnership with families during clinical practice.
· Entry to the Hub: a ‘no wrong door’ approach in which caregivers are safely engaged in a conversation about adversity and provided with any necessary support and/or referrals regardless of how they enter the Hub.
· Workforce development: workforce capacity building and training of Hub practitioners to engage families in a safe and respectful conversation to identify adversities and connect families to relevant support.
· Case-based discussions: monthly professional development with intersectoral Hub practitioners to embed training learnings into practice and facilitate between-practitioner referrals (i.e., ‘warm referrals’).
· Referral pathways into and out of the Hub: systematic mapping of available health, community and social sector supports and services in the local area, linked to training of Hub practitioners to use this information in their practice.
· Care navigation: a Wellbeing Coordinator will support caregivers to identify the holistic needs of their child and/or family and assist them to navigate relevant services and supports in the community, social and health sectors.
The Hub components will be trialled at IPC Health in Wyndham Vale from November 2021 – October 2022. We will collect pre- and post-intervention data to evaluate the Hub model.
Marrickville Hub update
At the Marrickville hub in the Sydney Local Health District, 11 interviews were undertaken with key stakeholders
Interviews highlighted the barriers that we need to address if service providers are to better detect and respond to children and families living in adversity, as well as associated mental health problems in children aged newborn to 8 years old.
Some of the common key barriers and enablers that were identified across stakeholder interviews for NSW & VIC included:
- Lack of knowledge or awareness of available supports
- Lack of services available; and
- Services focusing on a narrow definition of parent.
Enablers to address these include: raising awareness of supports that are available, providing support to families to enable them to navigate the system, and ensuring that services take a ‘whole of family’ approach.
Megan Taylor has recently joined the Community Paediatrics team as a Clinical Research Nurse, and is working full time on project coordination for the NSW-based CRE team associated with the Marrickville hub. Megan has a background in mental health nursing and is drawing on this experience to contribute to the co-design of the Marrickville hub, with a particular focus on networking and stakeholder engagement in the greater Marrickville community.
Co-designing technology assisted parenting interventions
Grace Aldridge and Meg Bennett are Clinical Psychology PhD Students from Monash University and are both part of the CRE student network.
Grace’s project is exploring how an evidence-based, technology-assisted parenting program designed to prevent internalising problems in children could be adapted for parents of children living with adversity, and integrated into a local health service. Meg’s project is exploring how such a program could be further adapted to suit the needs and preferences of parents with mental health issues.
Both projects are under the primary supervision of Associate Professor Marie Yap and co-supervised by Professor Patrick Olivier, Professor Andrea Rupert and Professor Anthony Jorm.
Grace and Meg plan to use co-design methods to develop their respective technology-assisted parenting programs, in partnership with IPC Health (Sunshine and Wyndham Vale). Both service providers at IPC Health and parents who use services there will be involved in the co-design team. Their co-design approach will be ‘experience-centred’; it aims to place a deep understanding of parents’ lived experience and trust between parents and researchers at the heart of the innovation and design process. Once the intervention is co-designed and developed, they will conduct a pilot evaluation at IPC Health to investigate its acceptability, perceived effectiveness in improving target parenting factors and child internalising symptoms, and the long-term feasibility of the program.
They both hope that their projects will provide a substantial contribution to the emerging (and messy!) co-design literature, integrate evidence-based principles of parenting into the IPC Health service journey, as well as provide IPC Health with a ‘toolkit’ outlining tools and tips for co-designing and promoting genuine engagement with clients in the future.
Awards and Achievements
- Congratulations to CRE Research Assistant, Renee Jones on being accepted for a PhD scholarship funded by EuroQol group. The Project will be an Evaluation of the EQ-5D-Y as a child PROM in tertiary hospitals for high impact childhood conditions and aims to understand, develop, co-design, implement and evaluate use of the EQ-5D-Y as a routine patient reported outcome measure (PROM) in managing clinical care in a tertiary paediatric children’s hospital.
- Our Child and Family Hub trial has now been registered with the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number Registry (ISCRTN).
A Delphi study to identify intervention priorities to prevent the occurrence and reduce the impact of adverse childhood experiences
Congratulations to Berhe Sahle and the team on their recent publication.
This study aimed to identify expert consensus-driven priority interventions for reducing the occurrence and impact of ACEs in children under 8 years of age in Australia
Key findings
Seven of the 34 interventions were endorsed as priority interventions for ACEs. These included four general categories of interventions: community-wide interventions, parenting programs, home-visiting programs, and psychological interventions. Two broad intervention programs were also endorsed: school-based anti-bullying interventions and psychological therapies for children exposed to trauma. Positive Parenting Program (Triple-P) was the only specific intervention that achieved consensus.
Click here to read more.
Recent publications
1. Sahle BW, Reavley NJ, Morgan AJ, Yap MBH, Reupert A, Jorm AF. A Delphi study to identify intervention priorities to prevent the occurrence and reduce the impact of adverse childhood experiences. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. July 2021. doi:10.1177/00048674211025717
2. Jones R, Hiscock H, Wurzel D, et al. Mental healthcare for children with chronic conditions: a qualitative study. Archives of Disease in Childhood Published Online First: 21 June 2021. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2021-321795
3. Reupert, A., Schaffer, G., von Hagen, A., Allen, K.A., Berger, E., Büttner, G., Power, E., Morris, Z., Paradis, P., Fisk. A., Summers, D., Wurf, G., & May, F. (in press). The practices of psychologists working in schools during COVID-19: A multi-country investigation. School Psychology.
4. Dunkley-Smith, A., Reupert, A., Ling, M., & Sheen, J. (in press). Experiences and perspectives of self-compassion from young adult children of parents with mental illness. Journal of Adolescence.
5. Allen, K., Berger, E., May, F., Wurf, G., & Rupert, A. (in press). Impact of school-based interventions for building school belonging in adolescence: A systematic review. Educational Psychology Review
6. Koirala A, Goldfeld S, Bowen A, Choong C, Ryan K, Wood N, Winkler N, Danchin M, Macartney K, Russell F. Lessons learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic: why Australian schools should be prioritised to stay open. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health. PMID: 34101922 doi:10.1111/jpc.15588.
7. Bryson H, Perlen S, Price A, Mensah F, Gold F, Dakin P, Goldfeld S. Patterns of maternal depression, anxiety and stress symptoms from pregnancy to 5 years postpartum in an Australian cohort experiencing adversity. Archives of Women's Mental Health doi: 10.1007/s00737-021-01145-0
8. Price A, Zhu A, Nguyen J, Contreras-Suarez D, Schreurs N, Burley J, Lawson K, Kelaher M, Lingam R, Grace R, Raman S, Kemp L, Woolfenden S, Goldfeld S. Study Protocol for the Healthier Wealthier Families (HWF) pilot randomised controlled trial: testing the feasibility of delivering financial counselling to families with young children who are identified as experiencing financial hardship by community-based nurses. BMJ Open 2021;11:e044488. PMID: 34020976 doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2020-044488.
9. Lloyd-Johnsen, C. Eades, S. McNamara, B. D’Aprano, A. & Goldfeld, S. A Global Perspective of Indigenous Child Health Research: a systematic review of longitudinal studies. International Journal of Epidemiology. PMID: 33864092 doi: 10.1093/ije/dyab074.
10. Goldfeld S, Moreno-Betancur M, Guo S, Mensah F, O'Connor E, Gray S, Chong S, Woolfenden S, Williams K, Kvalsvig A, Badland H, Azpitarte F, & O'Connor M. Inequities in children's literacy skills: The role of home reading and preschool attendance. Academic Pediatrics.10.1016/j.acap.2021.04.019.
11. Smith J, Conway L, Goldfeld S, Levickis P. Maternal linguistic input and child language in a cohort at risk of experiencing social adversity. Language Learning and Development. DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1875831
12. Elek, C., Gray, S., West, S., & Goldfeld, S. Effects of a professional development program on emergent literacy-promoting practices and environments in early childhood education and care. Early Years. DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2021.1898342.
13. Wilson AN, Ravaldi C, Scoullar MJL, et al. Caring for the carers: Ensuring the provision of quality maternity care during a global pandemic. Women Birth. 2021;34(3):206-209. doi:10.1016/j.wombi.2020.03.011
14. Bayer J, Brown A, Prendergast L, Bretheron L, Hiscock H, Mialopoulos C, Nelson-Lowe M, Gilbertson t, Noone K, Rapee R. Follow-up of the Cool Little Kids translational trial into middle childhood. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry doi: 10.1111/jcpp.13464 PMID: 34128236 2021 Jun 15 [Online ahead of print]
15. Bourke EM, Say DF, Carison A, Hill A, Craig S, Hiscock H, Babl FE, O'Donnell SM. Emergency mental health presentations in children with autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health 2021 May 8. doi: 10.1111/jpc.15535 PMID: 33963626
16. Brown SJ, Gartland D, Woolhouse H, Giallo R, McDonald E, Seymour M, Conway L, FitzPatrick KM, Cook F, Papadopoullos MacArthur C, Hegarty K, Herrman H, Nicholson JM, Hiscock H, Mensah F. The Maternal Health Study: study design update for a prospective cohort of first-time mothers and their first-born children from birth to age ten. Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology 2021 May 6 doi: 10.1111/ppe.12757 PMID: 33956353
17. Gartland D, Conway LJ, Giallo R, Mensah FK, Cook F, Hegarty K, Herrman H, Nicholson J, Reilly S, Hiscock H, Sciberras E, Brown SJ. Intimate partner violence and child outcomes at age 10: a pregnancy cohort. Archives of Disease in Childhood 2021 Apr 21;archdischild-2020-320321. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2020-320321 PMID: 33883191 [Online ahead of print]
18. Say DF, Carison A, Hill A, Hiscock H, Babl FE, O'Donnell S. Mental health presentations to the paediatric emergency department: A retrospective study. Journal Paediatrics and Child Health 2021 Jan 6. doi: 10.1111/jpc.15313 PMID: 33404176 [Online ahead of print]
19. Goldfeld S, Paton K, Shaoke L, Perera P, Hiscock H. Trends in Rates and Inequalities in Paediatric Admissions for Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions in Victoria, Australia (2003 to 2013). Journal Paediatrics and Child Health doi: 10.1111/jpc.15338 PMID: 33432713 (JPC-2020-1263) (IF: 1.572)
20. Jorm, Tony, “A bigger budget for mental health services won’t necessarily improve Australia’s mental health’’. The Conversation, 12 May 2021, 5.49pm AEST, https://theconversation.com/a-bigger-budget-for-mental-health-services-wont-necessarily-improve-australias-mental-health-160767
21. Allen, K., Reupert, A., & Oades, L. (2020, Editors). Building better schools with evidence-based policy. Routledge; Sydney
Click here to see all of our publications.
Tess Hall recently presented at a Knowledge Translation webinar on Understanding co-design (April 2021). Passcode: =9&^qaQ%
Meet our team
Introducing Marie Yap
Tell us about yourself?
I’m Marie Yap, Associate Professor and Psychologist based at the School of Psychological Sciences, Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at Monash University.
What is something people don't know about you?
I’ve only had 2 ambitions in my lifetime: the first was to be a mermaid (I loved being under water as a child), and the second was to be a psychologist.
What do you hope the CRE will achieve?
To make a real difference in our understanding of how best to support families experiencing adversity so that we can reduce the burden of mental health problems and suicidality in children and young people.
What are you currently working on in the Centre?
I’m supervising two PhD students Grace Aldridge and Meg Bennett who are working in partnership with IPC Health to co-design digital parenting interventions that can be incorporated into IPC Health services to support parents whose children are experiencing adversities, including parental mental illness.
What inspires your work?
Knowing that by supporting parents in their role in parenting their children, we can improve child and youth mental health
Find out more... https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/marie-yap
CRE staff updates
VIC
- Hayley Loftus – Research Coordinator now stepping into Implementation Lead position
- Renee Jones – NEW Research Assistant for CRE
- Jacinta Dermentzis – NEW Project Officer for CRE
NSW
- Megan Taylor – NEW Clinical Research Registered Nurse
- Lan Haynes – NEW Health Homes and Neighbourhoods (HHAN) Manager
- Pejman Adily – NEW Data analyst interested in social network analysis
