Virtual Solutions

Developing a digital eHub to improve caregiver access to and use of existing primary health, mental health, and social services

The Child and Family eHub aims to increase access to and use of information and services for primary health, mental health, and social services for children (0-12 years) and families, especially those facing adversity, to address mental health needs.

The website acts as a digital front door to find the right supports in the caregiver's local area - locating information you can trust, professionals you can talk to, and access to local parent support groups to learn from.

The pilot website is currently being acceptance tested. Evaluation of the eHub with caregivers in the Wyndham Vale area in Victoria and the Marrickville and Fairfield areas in NSW will commence in February 2024, and run throughout the year.

To stay informed of this development, subscribe to the Child and Family eHub Project Bulletin!

Achievements

Congratulations to Grace Aldridge! (PhD Student)

Grace's systematic review (summary below) has recently been published by the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) and she has since submitted her PhD (which is now under examination).

PhD Projects - an overview

Engaging Parents with Technology-Assisted Programs to Prevent Internalising Problems in Children with Adverse Childhood Experiences
Grace Aldridge

This research aimed to deeply understand how technology can engage parents of children who experience adversity with parenting interventions that help protect their child’s mental health. We reviewed the scientific literature and found that designing interventions with those who use it can make it more engaging. We therefore co-designed a technology-assisted parenting intervention (consisting of podcasts and micro-coaching) with a health service accessed by parents of children who experience adversity and developed strategies to support its implementation. This intervention empowers parents with strategies to protect their child’s mental health and has potential to be delivered widely at low cost.

Co-designing a technology-assisted parenting program for parents with mental health issues, to prevent child internalising problems
Meg Bennett

This PhD project focuses on co-designing, integrating and evaluating an adapted technology-assisted parenting program for parents with mental health concerns, who have primary school aged children (5-11 years).
The adapted parenting program will be integrated into the existing mental health services at IPC Health, a health service in Melbourne’s western suburbs, to ensure the program is as useful and accessible as possible.
Findings have indicated multiple needs to be addressed by a parenting program for parents with mental health issues including promoting parent autonomy, clinician support, validation and normalisation of experiences, tailoring to individual circumstances and strengths-based activities.
A prototype of the parenting program and the associated clinician training package are currently being developed in accordance with these findings. The program will involve parents completing online self-directed modules containing evidence-based parenting content and being supported by their existing mental health clinician to problem solve and implement parenting strategies in their life.
The next steps in this project in 2024 include finalising the intervention prototype and conducting a preliminary evaluation of the program’s usefulness.   

How Australian community health services use interagency collaboration to support families experiencing adversity 
Manisha Balgovind 

This research project comprised of three studies:
1) a systematic review,
2) a qualitative inquiry on interagency collaboration within community healthcare from the perspective of caregivers with young children experiencing adversity, and
3) another qualitative examination of interagency collaboration from the perspective of community health services supporting such families.

Many notable findings were made within these investigations. Some findings included caregivers and service providers reporting experiences of interagency collaboration as unidirectional referrals with no follow-up, and a lack of communication and information sharing between services. Consequently, caregivers reported a responsibility of initiating and facilitating interagency collaboration between services supporting their families.
In addition, service providers suggested the adoption of a central coordinator for interagency collaboration to overcome collaboration barriers. This is a known form of interagency collaboration, which past literature suggests has positive benefits for families accessing support for complex care and social needs.
Overall, these studies provide valuable insights on improving interagency collaboration within community healthcare for family adversity in Australia. 

"Completing the PhD alongside the CRE has been a rewarding and supportive experience. Thank you to the team for making this such a valuable experience." ~ Manisha

Improving responses to childhood adversity: A mixed methods assessment of barriers and facilitators of practice change
Sarah Loveday

Improving the identification and response to childhood adversity is key to changing the long-term outcomes for children. However, research shows that practitioners are reluctant to address adversity due to a perceived lack of community resources, time pressures and a deficit of training or confidence to ask and respond. Moreover, practitioners report that responding to adversity is emotionally taxing. Integrated health and social care hubs have the potential to address some of these barriers. 
Practitioners across health and social care were trained to identify and respond to adversity and were supported to develop integrated practice through lunchtime learning collaboratives and mapped referral pathways as part of an integrated health and social care Child and Family Hub. Practitioners completed surveys of self-reported competence and comfort to ask about and confidence to respond to adversity and participated in semi-structured interviews to explore the facilitators and barriers to practice change. 
Practitioners reported increased competence and comfort to directly ask, and confidence to respond across a range of adversities over the 12 month intervention.   Practitioners discussed the importance of social connection, knowledge, and the confidence in their ability to ask as key drivers of practice change. The barriers to practice change were the environmental context and resources i.e. time pressure as well as practitioner fear of ‘opening Pandora’s box’. While practitioner confidence can be improved through training, education and providing opportunities for practitioners to practice skills, practitioner comfort improved with social connection and learning from one another. 
Changing practice takes more than just education and training. Future projects need to build in opportunities for social connection and coaching to improve practitioner confidence and competence if they are to realise practice change. Overcoming the environmental context and resources barriers will require a change to primary care structure and funding.

All the best to our PhD students in the next stages of their careers!

Farewell & Baby News

We farewelled Lingling Chen, Research Assistant, who commenced maternity leave from mid-Nov. Lingling has been a valued member of the team and will be sorely missed.

Update: At the end of November, Lingling gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. We wish her and her family all the best with their new arrival! 

Recent conferences

Above: Natalie White presenting on Day 2 of the APIC3 conference 'Learnings from how a wellbeing coordination program can meet the needs of families facing adversity'.

3^rd Asia Pacific Conference on Integrated Care (APIC3) 

“Building healthcare system sustainability and resilience” which took place at the Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney on 13-15 November 2023.

This conference focussed on taking an equitable approach to designing and delivering health and care services, working across multiple organisations, health and care agencies, but also policing and housing and other support agencies, and including the NGO and the community sector.

To create truly sustainable and resilient health and care systems that really address health inequalities, a system-wide transformation is needed. A new focus on preventative health, particularly for socially and economically disadvantaged communities is required to support better outcomes for all. A system-wide approach is immediately required to achieve better outcomes for individual consumers and the wider population.

Our CRE group representatives from NSW and VIC presented 9 papers, one oral poster presentation and chaired 2 workshops.

CRE Representatives: Prof. Harriet Hiscock, Dr. Suzy Honisett, Natalie White, Molly Peterson, Lisa Minton, Ashraful Kabir, Prof. Sue Woolfenden, Dr. Amber Tickle, Anna Calik, Dr. Sarah Loveday, Dr. Tamara Morris, Kate Ebbett, Rebecca Bosward.

Above: The CRE Team (VIC) enjoying some team bonding time in Sydney!

Health Justice 2023 Conference

In November of 2023 nearly 200 people from across the country attended the Health Justice Australia Conference to discuss past, present, and future collaborations across the health, justice and wellbeing systems in Australia.
The CRE was lucky enough to be invited to speak about the health justice partnership that was develop in the Wyndham Vale Hub.
The panel discussion that CRE researcher, Natalie White, spoke at was a discussion titled “Health Justice Partnership - What's in it for health?”
The CRE work was one of 3 research studies that presented in the session on what health practitioners identify as needs that a HJP might meet.
The three different projects were in all different stages of establishment and discussed how the partnerships had evolved and their impact. The session also explored the 'system change' that HJP can make to services and practitioners as part of what is needed to support consumers experiencing intersecting health, legal and other needs.
Natalie felt it was an absolutely fantastic conference to attend. The innovative ways it was delivered were a joy to participate in. Particularly the inclusion of the experts in the room – the people with lived experience who were able to bring such rich insights to discussions.  
The CRE would like to thank Health Justice Australia for the opportunity to present on our lessons learned from the legal support services offered in the Wyndham Vale Hub. An evaluation of the services in the Hubs both in Wyndham Vale and Marrickville will be published in the coming 12 months. 

Natalie White is also one of our Researchers in Residence (RiR) for IPC Health and DPV Health. 

4th Alliance for the Prevention of Mental Disorders (APMD) 
2023 Society for Mental Health Research (SMHR) Conference

The conference included interactive discussions focusing on the latest Australian research relating to the prevention of mental health problems.

• Grace Aldridge (PhD student) presented a poster abstract on findings from her co-design and pre-implementation studies

National Child & Family Hubs Network News

Above: Launch of the National Child & Family Hubs Network - Nov 2023

• On 22 November 2023, the Hon. Minister for Early Childhood Education, Dr Anne Aly, launched the National Child and Family Hubs Network at Karitane in Carramarr, Sydney
• Our Child and Family Hubs article "Child and family hubs: an important ‘front door’ for equitable support for families across Australia" was voted Top 5 access articles in APO (Analysis Policy Online) across social issues!
• Now over 780 National Child and Family Hubs Network members!

A vision for a better system: the role of Child and Family Hubs
... more than 750 registered and 350 attended online!

Coinciding with the launch of the National Child and Family Hubs Network in November 2023, this webinar explored the pivotal role of Child and Family Hubs (Hubs) in connecting families to the services and social supports they need to thrive.

Discover the diverse Hub settings of Australia, good practices in Hubs and the benefits of boosting Hub investments, particularly for families experiencing adversity.

Panellists include Anne Hollonds, Jo Goulding, Andrew Resetti, Emma Sydenham, Dr Suzy Honisett and Prof Sharon Goldfeld.

Meet our team

Introducing Ashraful Kabir!

Tell us about yourself?

My name is Ashraful Kabir. I lead the qualitative implementation and evaluation of the CRE Childhood Adversity and Mental Health program at Wyndham Vale. I take on a range of functions and activities, including outcome evaluation, literature review, evidence synthesis, data analysis, and preparation of publications materials. I graduated in Anthropology and subsequently completed a Master of Public Health, and a Doctor of Philosophy from the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University.

What is something people don't know about you? 

I am cinephobic. I love watching classical movies. I spent approximately the entire salary of my first job to buy movie DVDs and later loaned them out to survive the rest of the month.

What do you hope the CRE will achieve? 

The CRE has designed and tested an integrated health and social care model of care at the child and family hub to address ACEs. This model of care has substantial implications for improving ACEs outcomes. I advocate for scaling up this care model to achieve optimum outcomes at a greater level.

What are you currently working on in the Centre?

I work within Theme B, which is implementing and evaluating childhood adversity and mental health.

What inspires your work? 

The CRE addresses a critical health concern for the child and families in Australia and similar contexts elsewhere. The CRE responses have added significant value to ACEs. The CRE’s scope of work, approaches, and focus on target groups inspire my work.

Acknowledgement of partners and staff

A huge THANK YOU to our partners, chief investigators, associate investigators and students for all the work and support you have provided throughout this project!

Recent publications

Aldridge, G., Tomaselli, A., Nowell, C., Reupert, A., Jorm, A., Yap, M., 2024. 'Engaging Parents in Technology-Assisted Interventions for Childhood Adversity: Systematic Review', Journal of Medical Internet Research, 26:e43994. doi.org/10.2196/43994

For a full list of publications, please visit our website!