Parental participation in the habilitation process--evaluation from a user perspective

Area of Science:

• Child development and rehabilitation
• Healthcare quality assessment
• Parental involvement in healthcare

Background:

• Developing effective tools to evaluate parental participation in child habilitation is crucial for quality improvement.
• Existing measures may not fully capture the user perspective or facilitate benchmarking.
• There is a need for a standardized instrument to assess the quality of habilitation services from the viewpoint of families.

Purpose of the Study:

• To create a national instrument for evaluating parental participation in child habilitation services.
• To establish a user-centered measure of quality and facilitate quality development in habilitation departments.
• To enable common grounds for evaluating habilitation processes and support benchmarking between services.

Main Methods:

• Modification of the Measurement of Processes of Care (MPOC) 20 to create the MPOC 28 instrument.
• Distribution of the MPOC 28 questionnaire to 4013 families with children (up to 18 years) using habilitation services in Sweden.
• Analysis of responses from 2458 families to identify key quality indicators.

Main Results:

• Regression analysis identified 12 fundamental questions reflecting parental perceptions of habilitation quality.
• These questions cover enabling/partnership, general information, coordinated/comprehensive care, and respectful/supportive care.
• Parental satisfaction is strongly linked to these identified quality indicators.

Conclusions:

• The MPOC 28 serves as a valuable analytical tool for assessing parental satisfaction with habilitation services.
• It enables longitudinal comparisons and measurement of changes in how parents prioritize different aspects of care.
• The instrument supports benchmarking of habilitation service departments.