FHT internal reports and studies

What Works with ultra high-risk families, March 2008
Best Practice Guidelines for Home Visiting Family Support, December 2007

What Works with ultra high-risk families, March 2008

What Works with ultra high-risk families: A comparative process evaluation of four community agencies providing home visitation child abuse prevention services. This is research in planning right now, involving Family Help Trust and three partner agencies, and this document is posted here so you can view what we are working toward and how it is progressing.

Project aims: This project is a national joint collaborative research initiative that intends to conduct a comparative study of work effectiveness with ultra high-risk families in multiple sites. The aim is to enhance quality of service delivery in home visitation services for families, whanau.

View a small PDF document summarising work to date »
For more information and other enquiries, please contact Libby Robins.

Best Practice Guidelines for Home Visiting Family Support, December 2007

Family Help Trust and Family Support Services Whanganui Trust, both Jigsaw affiliates, have developed a set of Best Practice Guidelines for Home Visiting Family Support that could be a useful tool for agencies with similar service types.

These processes produced rich data that show that best practice requires more than knowledge and technique. Equally important is the social worker’s ability to:

know and use the self, and
build and sustain effective social work relationships with clients

The guidelines tease out the detail of how the self and the relationship, and social work values, knowledge and skills work together to help families change and the implications for management of providing a service in which the social worker’s self and their relationship with the client are primary tools.

The analysis finds that best practice also requires mastery of:

cycles of assessment, planning and review that connect strongly with a family’s own goals and ways of resolving difficulties, and that work to encourage, support and maintain momentum
values and principles that are well integrated into agency function and individual practice so that the ethical, relationship and safety dilemmas that arise daily can be negotiated with the family in a respectful and effective way

Download and read the full report » (PDF, 895KB)