Foster carers' perceptions of the long‐term effectiveness of the Fostering Changes programme

Abstract

The present article reports foster carer perceptions of the long-term effectiveness of a carer-focussed training intervention -the Fostering Changes (FC) programme. Five foster carers who completed FC at a not-for-profit child and family agency in New Zealand were interviewed 13-15 months post-training about their experiences and perceptions of FC and its subsequent effectiveness. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) informed both data collection and analysis. Five superordinate themes were identified: (1) FC is perceived to be an effective training programme that provides sustained benefits; (2) foster carer training is crucially important; (3) the challenges of fostering continue, irrespective of training; (4) caregiver confidence gained from training wanes over time in the face of persistent challenges; (5) foster carers require ongoing therapeutic interventions and support because of their children's persistent behavioural and relational difficulties. The findings suggest that, while FC provides effective and relevant training, carers simultaneously require ongoing clinical services. K E Y W O R D S foster carer intervention, foster carer training, Fostering Changes programme, out-of-home care, placement support, treatment effectiveness This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Editorial

“…The first paper by Loren Whitehead and colleagues (2023) addresses foster and kinship carer perceptions of the long‐term effectiveness of the Fostering Changes training programme, a relationally based evidence‐informed training programme. The findings suggest that, while the training programme was viewed as providing effective and relevant training, carers also required ongoing clinical services to support them to meet the challenging needs of the children they were caring for.…”