FamilySmart Practice Readiness is an innovative program developed by the Institute of Families (IoF) that seeks to improve child and youth mental health by promoting collaborations between doctors, parents, and patients. Two concepts are central to the FamilySmart program: 1) “Together-Centeredness” or the ability of all stakeholders to make decisions collectively, and 2) “FamilySmart skills” or emotion-based skills that can be applied to make decisions more empathetically and taking into account other stakeholders’ points of view. This research project was a developmental evaluation of an innovative program in the field of child and youth mental health.
The FamilySmart Evaluation is a partnership developed between SARAVYC, the McCreary Centre Society, and the Institute of Families. This mixed-methods evaluation partnership aims to assess the pertinence and efficacy of the pilot phase of FamilySmart for this program to be scaled up across the province of British Columbia and eventually across Canada.
The objectives of the FamilySmart Evaluation are:
- to observe four pilot training sessions
- to interview training participants prior and after their participation in the training sessions
- to analyze the observational (quantitative and qualitative) and interview (qualitative) data and produce a community-friendly report outlining the evaluation results
- to provide recommendations for the improvement of the FamilySmart training program before scale-up.
Principal Investigators: Keli Anderson
Co-Investigators: Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc and Annie Smith
Funded by the Vancouver Foundation under the grant “FamilySmart Networks Evaluation”, 2016-2019
