Families as Partners in Care
Goal
To join with families, consumers, and mental health professionals in the promotion of best practice in mental health service delivery, based on evidence from research by experts.
Objectives
To influence psychiatric professionals, social workers, occupational therapists and other mental health workers in providing best-practice services.
To help professionals recognize the value of working with families towards a better quality of life for patients (consumers), better functioning, and ultimately, recovery.
To encourage families to recognize the benefits to the patient of their involvement with professionals caring for their relative.
The Program
A strategy to promote the inclusion of families in the treatment team was developed by a WFSAD group of family leaders and clinical experts in New Zealand in 1997. These included Prof. Ian R.H. Falloon, Prof. Julian Leff and Prof. Wm. McFarlane, as well as family leaders Dr. Margaret Leggatt, Diane Froggatt, Dr. Radha Shankar, Jim Crowe, Dr. Dale L. Johnson and other members of the WFSAD board. Prof. Falloon subsequently developed a bibliography of research findings to support the statement below.
Research indicates that better care, management and outcome is achieved for persons with mental illness when their families receive a continuum of education, training and support to carry out their role of primary informal care giver.
In 1998 the program was launched at the WFSAD biennial conference in Hamburg as Families as Partners in Care (FPC) and information about the initiative began to be disseminated.
The FPC program developed a set of goals and principles to guide mental health professionals and to ensure that families would be accepted as a valued and valuable part of the treatment team caring for a person with mental illness. Click here for FPC Goals and Principles. Families as Partners in Care — Principles for Working with Families is also available in booklet form from WFSAD.
Despite a vast amount of research showing that treatment services based on these principles were extremely effective in promoting stabilization and even recovery, few were being implemented. The document Families as Partners in Care (1998, Revised 2001) examined the barriers to implementation, key elements in provision of such services and what could be done to make the research information better known. The annotated bibliography of research findings entitled Cognitive-Behavioural Interventions for Patients with Functional Psychoses and their Caregivers by Ian Falloon, was included in the document.
Soon after the launch of the program, the WFSAD board of directors, which also constitutes the majority of its field workers, took training in Dr. Falloon's Optimal Treatment Program in order to have a broader view of "family interventions". From this time WFSAD personnel, when working abroad, would introduce the Families as Partners in Care philosophy, concept and principles to families and mental health professionals, with a view to influencing mental health systems and interesting administrators and service managers.
The Uganda Schizophrenia Fellowship introduced a program at its Jinja branch and as a result of this WFSAD developed a simplified manual for use in the developing world: Families as Partners in Care — Guide to Professionals doing Family Work in Developing Countries. This is available from WFSAD upon request and is also available in Spanish.
Throughout the following years WFSAD revised its original booklet Families as Partners in Care — a Work in Progress several times and has provided it when requested. In mid-2005 it was decided that no further revisions would be possible without a complete review of the materials and the development of a new publication. The work for this is now in progress and will be completed prior to our conference in September 2007.
