Client satisfaction with the early start service.

• Author: Fergusson, David M.
• Position: Family Start initiative

Abstract

Early Start, funded under the Government's Family Start initiative, is a home visitation service provided by trained family support workers designed to support, empower and assist families to address issues relating to child-rearing, parenting and family functioning. This paper examines a series of issues relating to client satisfaction with Early Start. A randomised field trial of programme efficacy involved a series of families receiving the Early Start service and a comparison series of families not receiving the service. At 36 months following trial entry, families who had received Early Start (n = 163) were asked about their satisfaction with the service. Client families reported generally high levels of satisfaction, similar for Maori and non-Maori. Higher levels of satisfaction were associated with increasing service duration and having fewer family support workers involved with the family.

INTRODUCTION

There has been growing interest and investment in home visitation programmes for families facing stress and difficulties. Typically these programmes are targeted at families facing severe stress or difficulty, are provided by home visitors with small case loads and are of lengthy duration (for a review of the literature see Gomby et al. 1999). The aim of these programmes is to form collaborative partnerships with families to encourage positive outcomes for children and their families. In New Zealand a number of home visitation models have been developed and evaluated. The models include Parents as First Teachers (Boyd 1997, Campbell and Silva 1997, Livingstone 1998) and the Family Start programme (Evaluation Management Group 2003). Evaluations of these programmes have produced mixed results, which suggest both limitations in programme success and issues relating to programme delivery (Evaluation Management Group 2003, Farquhar 2003, Livingstone 1998).

An approach to home visitation that has recently been subject to a rigorous evaluation is the Early Start programme, developed in Christchurch by a consortium of local providers, Maori and researchers. The evaluation of the Early Start programme used a randomised design in which 220 families enrolled in the Early Start programme were contrasted with 223 families not enrolled in Early Start, with both groups being studied over a 36-month follow-up period. Funding for the service provision component of the randomised trial was provided under the Government's Family Start initiative; funding for the evaluation component of the trial was provided by the Health Research Council of New Zealand.

Analyses of the trial results led to four major conclusions about the effectiveness of the Early Start programme.

* The programme was associated with small but pervasive benefits in the areas of child health, pre-school education, parenting, child abuse and neglect, and childhood behavioural adjustment (Fergusson, Grant et al. 2005; Fergusson, Horwood et al. 2005).

* The programme did not lead to detectable changes in parental and family outcomes, including maternal health, family socio-economic conditions, family stability, family violence and family stress (Fergusson et al. 2006; Fergusson, Horwood et al. 2005).

* Programme benefits were similar for Maori and non-Maori but, if anything, Maori clients received slightly greater benefits from the programme.

* In comparison to other international and local randomised trials of home visitation programmes, the results from the Early Start evaluation were as good as--if not better than--those reported in the literature (Fergusson, Horwood et al. 2005).

While these results clearly suggest that Early Start was an effective home visitation model, which produced benefits for client children, the randomised trial provides only one perspective on this service by examining the extent to which the service led to beneficial outcomes. An equally important issue concerns the ways in which the client families perceived the service and the extent to which they saw the service as meeting their needs. These issues are important for at least three reasons.

* There has been a growing recognition in the areas of health and social services of the need for service providers to take account of the views and perspectives of the client population.

* In the areas of home visitation and family support, there have been ongoing debates and suggestions that such programmes may have harmful effects by exposing client families to stigmatisation or through the imposition of intrusive or inappropriate programmes (Sanders 1999).

* These concerns have been underwritten in New Zealand by broader concerns about the need for health and social programmes to be delivered in a way that is culturally appropriate and acceptable to Maori (Fanslow et al. 2000, Ministry of Health 1998, Voyle and Simmons 1999).

For all three reasons it is important to supplement data from the outcome evaluation of Early Start with a parallel evaluation of the service from the client's perspective.

Against this background, this paper reports on the results of a client satisfaction survey conducted at the 36-month follow-up with families enrolled in the Early Start programme.

The aims of this analysis are threefold:

to examine overall levels of client satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the Early Start service in terms of three general domains:

--the extent to which the service assisted the family in achieving specific goals and outcomes

--the nature of the relationship between the family and the family support worker

--the client's overall assessment of the service in terms of cultural appropriateness and effectiveness

* to compare levels of client satisfaction between Maori and non-Maori (specifically, the results of the randomised trial suggested that, if anything, Early Start was slightly more effective with Maori clients than with non-Maori clients, and an important question raised by this result is whether similar results were evident for levels of client satisfaction)

* to identify client and service-related factors associated with the variation in service satisfaction.

METHODS

Client Recruitment

Clients for the trial were recruited using a population-based screening procedure. In this procedure, Plunket community nurses in the Christchurch urban region screened all new clients using an 11-point screening measure based on the measure used in the Hawaii Healthy Start Program. This screening measure covers several areas of parent and family functioning, including age of parents, social support, planning of pregnancy, parental substance use, family financial situation and family violence. Plunket Nurses were asked to refer any family where two or more risk factors were present. In addition, Plunket nurses were asked to refer any family in which there were serious concerns about the family's capacity to care for the child.

Over the 19-month recruitment period (January 2000 through July 2001), Plunket nurses saw 4,523 families, with 588 of these families being eligible for the trial. Of those eligible for the trial, 443 (75%) agreed to participate in the study. The evaluation of the Early Start programme used a randomised controlled design in which the outcomes of 220 families enrolled in the programme were compared with the outcomes of 223 control families. Sample size was determined by the availability of funding for the service. The present study of client satisfaction involves the 220 families who entered the Early Start service. In all cases, signed consent was obtained at the point of study referral. The study design had the ethical approval of the Canterbury Ethics Committee.

Service Delivery

Early Start uses a social learning model approach to home visitation. The critical elements of this model include:

* assessment of family needs, issues, challenges, strengths and resources

* development of a positive partnership between the family support worker (FSW) and client

* collaborative problem solving to devise solutions to family challenges

* the provision of support, mentoring and advice to assist client families to mobilise their strengths and resources

* involvement with the family throughout the child's pre-school years.

This model aims to strike a balance between deficits-based approaches that focus solely on family limitations, and an exclusively strengths-based approach that may fail to attend to family deficits. Details of the programme, including programme delivery and programme goals, have been given in a previous paper (Fergusson, Grant et al. 2005).

Research Assessments

At baseline and 36 months following trial enrolment, client families were assessed on a structured interview...