Evaluating family partnership training in health visitor practice

The second paper in this series of two on partnership examines the effects of family partnership (parent adviser) training which builds on health visitors' skills to facilitate partnership working with parents. This study was utilised as a pilot to identify a suitable method, to explore the interaction processes of health visitors who had undergone the training. The study draws together both quantitative and qualitative methods to seek to understand processes in depth. Three health visitors, who were part of a training group of 12, took part in the qualitative research using stimulated recall methodology. The quantitative data was collected from the whole training group using the Constructions of Helping questionnaire and the course evaluation form. The findings suggest that the family partnership training may be effective in enhancing partnership working in health visiting and that the stimulated recall methodology is an effective method of identifying the processes of interaction. The triangulation of methods led to an understanding that change in practice is dependent on the insight of the practitioner and that this may be able to be measured to some extent by the use of different methods.