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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.
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.
Early Educators from Free Range Kids attending Read and Grow training