Reinforce social workers in assessing, planning and monitoring home care interventions

This paper presents a still in progress research about an outcome evaluation program on home care treatment, which has been requested from the University of Padua by the Local Health Authority of Belluno (Italy). The goal of the research is to measure and evaluate benefits obtained by children and families in 29 home care interventions and to enable professionals to do that. The project has worked out with social workers innovative practices and tools to assess the state of children and their families (CWBS and and instruments for the documentation and evaluation of the plans) at the intake (May 2009), and six and twelve moths later. First gathering of data showed that social workers identify more problems for parents than children (56% vs. 44%), but they work more with children then parents (45% vs. 55%). Also, they don’t involve parents in plans, except on implementation of care actions. We decided with social workers to try to reinforce families’ involvement through a new process of intervention witch social workers are going to try in situations, while others will carry on as usual. At the end of the project (June 2010) we will report the differences in outcomes between the two groups.