Family support service performance standards - feedback from parents

In November 2007 several consultation sessions were carried out with parents to look at the new Supporting Families Service Standards. The purpose of this was to gain their views on the standards and what as service users they thought was important to include. Sessions were carried out at North East Family Support Centre, Leyfield and Bolsover. A total of 9 parents were interviewed.

Findings

The following information was gained from the interviews and should be included in the standards:

The attitude of staff is important. Parents identified that they need to be treated with respect. They are more likely to engage with workers who do not talk “down” to them but are supportive in a non judgmental way.
That support needs to be geared to the individual. The family should be seen as individual and an individualised service needs to be offered.
The information held on the family is treated as confidential and parents are kept informed of any actions and any written information held about them.
The individual support workers are contactable and turn up on time to appointments. If they are running late then service users should be informed.
The service users should be asked about any changes to their service specifically and to the wider service as a whole.
The individual centres should be inspected to ensure that they are clean and safe. There needs to be adequate security at the centres.
The centres need to be welcoming and friendly, for example pictures of the walls.
The support offered should be reviewed regularly and should be tapered off rather than coming to an abrupt end.
Clear information on how to complain should be made available when joining the service.
The Service needs appropriately trained staffing at the right staffing levels.

This information has been checked against the new standards to ensure that all the points are incorporated.

The following general feedback was also gained:

The feedback gained was that the parents were very pleased with the services they had from the Family Support Service.
Parents commented that the non judgmental advice given was very valuable and that they were more likely to work in partnership with the Family Support Services than other professionals, for example health.
The parents valued early intervention. In several cases they said they wished the intervention had been earlier in order to avoid a crisis situation.
The parents valued the group sessions, courses and welcomed the opportunity to meet up with other parents. They felt it was good not to “feel like the only one struggling”.