Brief Interventions for Families Seeking Support from Family Services: A Scoping Review

Area of Science:

• Family and Community Services
• Mental Health Interventions
• Public Health

Background:

• Intensive, long-term family support can be inefficient and unappealing.
• Brief, non-medical interventions offer a potentially effective and acceptable alternative for families facing adversity.
• Understanding the landscape of brief interventions is crucial for optimizing support services.

Approach:

• Systematic search and selection of publications (papers and webpages) on non-medical brief interventions for parents and families.
• Inclusion criteria: interventions targeted at parents/families, non-medical, and brief (≤10 hours or ≤4 sessions).
• Data extraction and charting from 78 eligible publications covering 46 distinct brief interventions.

Key Points:

• Most brief interventions were delivered in mental health (48%), followed by education (24%) and community/family services (20%), primarily in clinical settings.
• Intervention durations ranged from 45 minutes to 2 days, often targeting child/youth mental health improvement.
• Delivery modes included groups (45%), whole families (27%), and individual parents (23%).

Conclusions:

• This scoping review advances understanding of non-medical brief family support interventions for families experiencing adversity.
• Highlights a pressing need for high-quality evaluations regarding the acceptability and efficacy of these diverse interventions.
• Further systematic reviews are required due to variations in delivery, duration, and conceptualization of 'brief intervention'.