context
Parents and families
Our teams consulted with parents in Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion, including families of children with disabilities and impairments. What they told us echoes what we often hear in Pembrokeshire but we need to repeat this listening task across our region.
“Why can’t they all sit down in a room together and discuss my child’s progress and goals for him, so that all staff know what they’re working on with him?”
– A mum in Carmarthenshire
Parents and families want:
- Services that are more responsive and more personal
- To build relationships with individual professionals
- To trust that their worries and concerns will be taken seriously
- To move between professionals and services without having to repeat their history every time
- To avoid being sent to the wrong service, or to services that no longer exist
- Services to be accessible nearby, and at convenient times
- To easily find out what services are available to them
- Courses, or other ways to learn about their child’s development at various ages.
Parents and families need professionals to:
- Communicate with each other, so that parents are not the one translating between services
- Be well informed and up to date about what support is available and appropriate for their case
- Respond to their problems, worries and concerns – professionals who make assumptions about what difficulties facing a family are likely to miss out on important information and opportunities to make a difference to the lives of children in their care
- Be enabled to pass important information easily (but securely) between services, so that everyone always has the most up-to-date information about each child
Sector professionals
We conducted a series of workshops involving professionals working in service delivery in each of our three local authorities and Hywel Dda. We spoke to more than 50 individual staff members, covering management and front line roles in health, education and social care.
"We need to develop a person-centred approach to transition, involving families in the process"
– Early Years Professional
Professionals tell us:
- They feel stretched, and morale is low
- We have some excellent practice, but not everyone has access to it
- Services vary geographically
- Short-term, siloed funding gets in the way of delivering the best services
- It should be easier for families to give feedback about the quality of services, and make suggestions for improving them
- There are some families that we do not reach
- We do not engage with families enough antenatally
- Professionals need to help one another across service boundaries; we should not only be working within our own service
- Information about families is held across different systems and is very hard to share in a way that’s useful to professionals
- It is not easy enough to find out what services are available for which families and which needs
- We want our services to respond to family needs and experiences
- We want to invest in professionals outside of the public sector
Professionals are particularly worried about families where:
- Family difficulties become apparent during pregnancy
- Parents have poor mental health
- People live with conflict and violence
- Children have speech, language or communication needs
- Children have additional learning needs
- Children need help as they move from nurseries and childcare to school
Professionals would like to see in future where:
- Targeted home visiting is an effective way to support families
- There’s a single set of common processes which all professionals in the region use: including a common referral process, common assessment tools and thresholds, and agreed language used to describe needs
- Services are joined up, so that families do not experience boundaries and barriers between services
- Families are able to find and access services they want and need
- Partners recognise that different communities and different family members may have different needs
- Partners are jointly accountable – where a partnership group takes lead responsibility for delivering maternity and Early Years goals
- Outcomes are monitored at an individual level, and at a population level
- Training is open to all professionals
