The Centre of Research Excellence (CRE) in Childhood Adversity and Mental Health is working to co-design, test and evaluate an integrated child and family hub for families in Wyndham Vale, Victoria.
The Centre of Research Excellence (CRE) in Childhood Adversity and Mental Health is a five-year research program (2019-2023) co-funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Beyond Blue.
The CRE is 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.
Co-design workshops
Co-design is the active involvement of a diverse range of participants in exploring, developing, and testing responses to shared challenges (Blomkamp, 2018).
The CRE recently completed an intensive 10-week co-design series which involved seven half-day workshops with a core team of five local practitioners representing health, education, and social services and two local community members.
To guide the co-design process, the CRE used client personas to illustrate what a typical client journey through the Hub may look like. The design team then mapped out the barriers for addressing adversity at the individual, service and system level and then developed several prototyped solutions for overcoming these barriers. For example, one of the solutions was to use multilingual posters in the waiting room to better engage families in the service.
The solutions were tested with over 100 people, including children, families and practitioners, and then further refined based on feedback received.
Find out more about the Hub’s co-design process.
Next steps
The CRE is planning to implement the co-designed solutions into the Wyndham Vale Child and Family Hub in November 2021.
Six components and activities will be implemented:
- Family partnerships
- Entry to the Hub
- Workforce development
- Case-based discussions
- Referral pathways into and out of the Hub
- Care navigation.
The integrated hub model of care will be tested for 12 months and evaluated using a mixed-methods realist evaluation approach.
For more information on the CRE in Childhood Adversity and Mental Health, and to subscribe to their newsletter, visit http://www.childhoodadversity.org.au