BUSHkids Annual Report 2015-16

CSM

Clinical Services Manager The Clinical Leadership Team (CLT) has been working to ensure that our regional teams receive clear direction and support in carrying out their roles. This has included more regional visits by members of the CLT to provide direct observations of clinical sessions with feedback to frontline staff, in-service training, stakeholder liaison and team development. One of the service provision highlights during the year was getting our new Department of Social Services (DSS) funded family and children services in Stanthorpe, Kingaroy and Agnes Water up and running and embedded in the local networks. These services represent a new practice model at BUSHkids. Early Intervention Facilitators (EIFs) are based in the three locations, with a Social Worker Team Leader providing a managerial and senior practitioner role across the sites. Implementing new programs that support the teams to provide more targeted and universal programs, and developing resources and programs to support this work, have been and will continue to be a focus for BUSHkids. Ensuring continuous review and improvement of services is also an ongoing focus of our work. The implementation of an outcome measurement tool has been a significant achievement this year. Read and Grow Read and Grow is an interactive, parent-child story-sharing program that was developed by the Northern Gold Coast Communities for Children. Read and Grow is an emergent literacy program that provides skills for parents and carers to make reading a fun and engaging activity and allows the modelling of reading skills. As children are not ‘wired’ to read, this program provides skills for parents and carers to teach and model reading to their children. BUSHkids introduced the Read and Grow program to speech pathology staff at the 2015 BUSHkids Conference. Seven Speech- Language Pathologists participated in the workshop and became train-the-trainers for the program. Since the 2015 Conference, the seven SLPs have trained 86 people to be train-the-trainers in the Read and Grow program. The locations where training was provided include Stanthorpe, Warwick, Dalby, Kingaroy, Agnes Water and Mount Isa. The audiences have included a mix of childcare workers, kindy teachers, prep teachers, Allied Health professionals, volunteers and playgroup co-ordinators. BUSHkids’ SLPs have incorporated Read and Grow into all levels of service delivery including individual sessions, targeted groups and community capacity-building. The DSS-funded EIFs were all trained in Read and Grow to incorporate into their individual work with families and to guide the development of playgroup plans. As at June 2016, 61 parents/carers had attended a Read and Grow playgroup, witnessing an EIF role-modelling the skills of Read and Grow, and more than 150 children had listened to EIFs read and share stories using the Read and Grow method of story sharing. On 24 occasions other community workers have attended playgroups and learnt more about the practical applications of the Read and Grow strategies in working with children. Using this model in playgroups is helping children to develop a lifelong love of stories, books and reading. The Read and Grow approach in BUSHkids was further expanded by the development of a one-hour parent/carer program. This program was tested in three sites — Warwick, Proston and Agnes Water. A quality review of the initial workshops sawmodifications made to the program which was then presented in Kingaroy twice and twice in Stanthorpe. The program teaches the four key strategies of the Read and Grow program and is practically- orientated. There were 21 parents/carers trained this financial year and a further four workshops were presented in August.

BUSHkids teams have partnered with schools and local libraries to present the Read and Grow parent/carer workshops. These workshops have also been booked for a number of prep transition programs as education for parents/carers. A number of vulnerable groups of people in all communities will never attend a community education program. To meet the needs of these families, a five-week home visit Read and Grow program has been developed. This program involves the BUSHkids team member visiting the home with books and demonstrating Read and Grow strategies at each visit, gradually increasing the skills and confidence of the parent/carer in sharing a book and reading to their children. The family is left with books to practise the skills. Read and Grow’s Karyn Johns has been keen to partner with BUSHkids to further develop this program to work towards an evidence-based status. This new program will begin at all DSS sites in early 2017.

Early Educators from Free Range Kids attending Read and Grow training

Telehealth project Telehealth involves the delivery of healthcare services at a distance using telecommunications technology — for example, via the internet. BUSHkids is partnering with the Centre for Research Excellence (CRE) in Telehealth, The University of Queensland, on the project entitled ‘A Telehealth Framework for BUSHkids’. This research project aims to assist BUSHkids in developing and implementing a telehealth framework to enable the organisation to improve access to our services for clients living in rural and remote areas. The project is comprised of three stages: a needs analysis, a proof of concept study, and broader implementation of telehealth. The entire project is expected to take three to four years to complete. A full-time PhD student, Jessica Campbell, has been recruited for the project and is being supervised by the UQ advisory team: Professor Deborah Theodoros, Professor Trevor Russell, Associate Professor Nicole Gillespie and Dr Nicole Hartley. The doctoral student is working closely with BUSHkids through Felicity Rayner, the BUSHkids Telehealth Project Officer based at the Emerald Centre. Jessica and her advisory team have designed the first stage of research (Stage 1: Service Gap Analysis) which aims to describe gaps between current and desired BUSHkids health service delivery and willingness of stakeholders to adopt telehealth. This first stage involves phone and face-to-face interviews with BUSHkids’ clients, staff members, decision-makers, and community stakeholders, and analysis of BUSHkids’ service data. The project design for the first stage has been approved by The University of Queensland Human Research Ethics Committee. The doctoral student has commenced data collection. Stage 1 of the research is anticipated to continue until early 2017.

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