Thursday, March 02, 2006
PARENT EDUCATION PROGRAMME
Christ Grace H, Raveis Victoria H, Siegel Karolynn, Karus Daniel, Christ Adolph
Evaluation of a preventive intervention for bereaved children
Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care v (3) 2005
184 families completed a 12 month parent-guidance (experimental) or a parent telephone-monitoring (comparison) intervention initiated during one parent’s terminal cancer illness and continued until 6 months after the death.
The parent guidance intervention was designed to span about 12 months and included 6 or more 60-90 minute therapeutic interviews by experienced social workers during the terminal stage of the illness and six or more after the death. Ways of handling emerging problems with the children and current approaches to communication about the terminal illness were also discussed at each meeting.
Children in the parent-guidance intervention reported greater reduction in trait anxiety and greater improvement in their perceptions of the surviving parent’s competence and communication, a primary goal of the intervention. Of interest is the fact that 16% of the study children came from minority families and these were not included in the quantitative analyses as it was considered that there was an insufficient number of families of any one minority to analyse separately.
Various problems in implementing evaluations of experimental interventions with bereaved children include the following: a)available and commonly used standardised psychopathology measures do not adequately capture changes in non-psychopathological but bereaved distressed, grieving children and adolescents b) small changes in scores within the normal range
may be insufficient to allow measurement of meaningful differences between interventions. c)both experimental and control interventions must provide sufficient help to retain families for later evaluation.
Also of note is the fact that the level of general support and referral for other treatments, if adequately done, may be sufficient to blur differences in standardised psychopathology measure scores between any two interventions. It may only be in the specifically targeted intervention area that differences can be expected to be significant. This is, in fact what did happen.
Supportive care for parents was valued by them. The service was offered in the home and the authors consider the focus on patient education, rather than a more emotion-focused approach, fostered a more realistic understanding of the complex situation. Suggestions for improvement included more sessions with parents after the 6 month period, as they felt they were just beginning an intense period of their own grieving at that time – some would have liked more group work and some would have liked the children to have been seen more frequently by clinicians.This highlights the difficulty of using psyschological measures to capture positive change, yet it also highlights the helpfulness of such intereventions.
(Article available from library – email: d.brady’stchristophers.org.uk)
Evaluation of a preventive intervention for bereaved children
Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care v (3) 2005
184 families completed a 12 month parent-guidance (experimental) or a parent telephone-monitoring (comparison) intervention initiated during one parent’s terminal cancer illness and continued until 6 months after the death.
The parent guidance intervention was designed to span about 12 months and included 6 or more 60-90 minute therapeutic interviews by experienced social workers during the terminal stage of the illness and six or more after the death. Ways of handling emerging problems with the children and current approaches to communication about the terminal illness were also discussed at each meeting.
Children in the parent-guidance intervention reported greater reduction in trait anxiety and greater improvement in their perceptions of the surviving parent’s competence and communication, a primary goal of the intervention. Of interest is the fact that 16% of the study children came from minority families and these were not included in the quantitative analyses as it was considered that there was an insufficient number of families of any one minority to analyse separately.
Various problems in implementing evaluations of experimental interventions with bereaved children include the following: a)available and commonly used standardised psychopathology measures do not adequately capture changes in non-psychopathological but bereaved distressed, grieving children and adolescents b) small changes in scores within the normal range
may be insufficient to allow measurement of meaningful differences between interventions. c)both experimental and control interventions must provide sufficient help to retain families for later evaluation.
Also of note is the fact that the level of general support and referral for other treatments, if adequately done, may be sufficient to blur differences in standardised psychopathology measure scores between any two interventions. It may only be in the specifically targeted intervention area that differences can be expected to be significant. This is, in fact what did happen.
Supportive care for parents was valued by them. The service was offered in the home and the authors consider the focus on patient education, rather than a more emotion-focused approach, fostered a more realistic understanding of the complex situation. Suggestions for improvement included more sessions with parents after the 6 month period, as they felt they were just beginning an intense period of their own grieving at that time – some would have liked more group work and some would have liked the children to have been seen more frequently by clinicians.This highlights the difficulty of using psyschological measures to capture positive change, yet it also highlights the helpfulness of such intereventions.
(Article available from library – email: d.brady’stchristophers.org.uk)
