Ms Karen Nitsche1, Ms Nicky Lawrence1, Ms Bridget Pieterse1, Ms Natasha Bear2
1Child And Adolescent Health Service, Perth, Australia, 2Institute for Health Research, Notre Dame University, Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia
Biography:
Karen Nitsche is a Senior Research and Evaluation Analyst with the Child and Adolescent Health Service and also has extensive clinical experience working as a speech pathologist in a variety of settings in both Western Australia and Victoria. This has included both clinical and project roles in the disability, education and health sectors. She is passionate about the provision of quality, evidence-based primary health care programs that improve the early childhood outcomes of children in Western Australia.
Abstract:
This presentation reports on the development and validation of the SET and GO, a nine-item parenting self-efficacy outcome measurement tool, developed by the Child Development Service (CDS) in Perth, Western Australia. CDS is a multidisciplinary service, which supports caregivers with children who have diverse developmental concerns ranging in age from 0 to 18 years. The SET and GO was developed to address an identified gap in available tools that quantify the impact of capacity-building services on caregivers taking part in developmental interventions with their child.
The SET and GO, a retrospective pretest-posttest scale, was developed in a collaboration between staff and consumers and validated with 204 caregivers accessing a range of services including developmental paediatrics, audiology, speech pathology, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, clinical psychology and social work. Analysis of the tool’s psychometric properties indicated that the SET and GO is unidimensional with good internal consistency and test re-test reliability, and adequate construct validity. A preliminary minimal clinically important difference value of ≥7 was established.
This research demonstrates the clinical utility of the SET and GO, a valid and reliable tool that could be adopted by other child development services to measure meaningful outcomes for families. Future research will focus on the implementation of the tool within CDS, and collection of a larger validation sample to allow assessment of the validity of the tool when used with Aboriginal caregivers.