Early support: Evaluation of the pilot projects and the development of an implementation model

Abstract

Abstract Early support is an overall concept of health promoting and preventive measures for families with children up to 3 years. This includes direct interventions for children as well as offers and measures for parents and other caregivers. Based on a first research project, which showed that health and social services are repeatedly confronted with stressful family situations, but that families are often only supported late or too late, there were implemented two pilot projects in an urban and rural area of Northern Italy (called South Tyrol). The projects were evaluated using a multimethod approach, analysing existing documentation, and through focus groups, interviews, and qualitative questionnaires. The results of all the different research methods show very uniformly that many professionals and responsible persons were insufficiently informed about the health promotional and preventive potential of early support and about the importance of a good collaboration and network for a healthy start in live at the beginning of the projects. It took two years of intensive process to improve cooperation, but also knowledge and competences in this area. Through the intensive coordinated cooperation in a core team of public social and health services and psychologists (family counselling), a significant improvement could be achieved not only for these members of this core team, but above all also for the entire departments of the collaborating services. Professionals reported that not only has the quality of their work improved significantly because of this process, but there is also a noticeable lightening of the workload, which must be of great importance in the burdening fields of social and health services. Building on the results of the evaluation of these projects a model was developed of how a system of early support that accompanies families in a healthy start can be implemented in the whole region. The implementation is approved for 2022. Key messages The aim of early support is to build systems to strengthen and support all families preventively. Interdisciplinary cooperation in early support teams led to improved quality of work and lower workloads.