Research Associate Centerstone, Tennessee, United States
Abstract Information: This poster presentation will describe the Flourish program, recount the implementation process, and discuss the successes, challenges, lessons learned and outcomes of the program while allowing for audience feedback. Flourish aims to improve the well-being, permanency, and safety of children involved in the child-welfare system as a result of parental substance abuse. Flourish provides Evidence-Based group parenting interventions along with an array of supportive services tailored to each family’s needs through the utilization of telehealth. Originally, Flourish intended to provide services in 8 Southern Illinois counties, both urban and rural, where behavioral health service provider “deserts” existed. In response to COVID, through telehealth services and medical billing provisions, Flourish expanded its service area to include all Illinois counties resulting in a total of 26 counties served. The COVID-19 pandemic affected the availability of services across the nation, by transitioning all aspects of service delivery to telehealth, Flourish was able to fill the gaps and meet the demands in the community. During this time family needs shifted to require more supportive approaches in order to cope with the COVID environment and for technological support. Flourish leveraged case management and peer recovery specialist services to support families, maintain engagement and assist with any barriers. By utilizing telehealth, Flourish was able to enrolled 243 families over 3 years (exceeding the original goal of 104 families by 234%) and over half successfully completed the program. Successful completion not only comprised of attendance, but also engagement and demonstration of material comprehension. Throughout programming families were encouraged to submit anonymous feedback, staff participated in focus groups and community members contributed to collaboration assessment. These three levels of voices were utilized to leverage program successes, identify areas of focus, problem solve and for continuous program improvement. With community, stakeholder and family support the Flourish program was able to grow, learn, improve and provide structured evidence-based group parenting education in an area where such services were nearly non-existent. Positive outcomes suggest that families who participate in the Flourish program are able to reduce in areas of substance use, trauma, and depression while increasing family functioning and parenting attitudes. This poster will encompass how the use of telehealth, community voices and data were used to guide Flourish program success.
Relevance Statement: Mixed methodology can help better understand evaluation questions and provide context to results. Quantitative results can only provide so much information about an evaluation and it does not begin to answer the why. Qualitative approaches can help better understand the meaning behind results, especially if the numbers are not supported statistically or through power. Each stakeholder holds a unique set of interests dependent on their level of involvement in the research or evaluation and it is important to include all levels of voices to better understand what is meaningful, what is considered successful and where areas of improvement are for all that are affected. This is also an iterative process that should be utilized throughout. As needs, attitudes, relationships and environments change so should our approaches to address them. What worked at the beginning may not be an effective approach later in an evaluation. Eliciting, listening and acting on feedback routinely can guide implementation, quality improvement and support the impact of our work.
