Working with Families to Develop and Implement an Individualized Family Service Plan: A Rural Inservice Training Model

Abstract

Public Law 99-457, Part H, Program for Handicapped Infants and Toddlers, has created a significant challenge and need for personnel training. This article describes an inservice training project designed to develop the skills of rural professionals in developing and implementing family-focused Individualized Family Service Plans (IFSPs). The primary goals of the training are to provide early interventionists from numerous disciplines with a philosophy, a process framework for developing IFSPs with families, and to teach the skills needed to implement that process. The results of the training with professionals from six regional training workshops serving rural families are presented.

Family‐centred care in early intervention: A systematic review of the processes and outcomes of family‐centred care and impacting factors

“…Service operations and resources was the most frequent theme, accounting for factors such as the endorsement and ‘formation of quality teams’ at the service level (Ely & Ostrosky, 2018), the ‘frequency of professional contact with family’ (Wilkins et al, 2010), ‘administrative’ difficulties (Mahoney & O'Sullivan, 1990), service coordination (Fordham et al, 2012) and time constraints (Douglas et al, 2020), amongst other variables. This was related to the theme of service location and logistics , which included the ‘distance between child and therapy’ (Dall'Alba et al, 2014), the distance between team members (Brotherson et al, 1993), and service delivery settings such as home‐ versus clinic‐based service delivery (Ridgley et al, 2020) and EI provided in education settings (Ueda & Yonemoto, 2020). This therefore accounted for the significance of context in the effective delivery of FCC.…”

“…This included the topic of child-focused activities, which acknowledged the role of targeted 'child-centred' care practices (Ideishi et al, 2010) delivered in conjunction with FCC, such as 'habilitation' (Leiter, 2004) and 'physical disability' (Stefánsd ottir & Th ora Egilson, 2016). The theme of professional competency and development was identified to represent the attainment of necessary skills to work in an EI setting, such as mandated FCC training in transitioning services (Gràcia et al, 2020), experience working with both families and teams (Brotherson et al, 1993) and the capacity for professionals to become increasingly competent (Dyke et al, 2006) and even 'entrepreneurial' (Carter & Thomas, 2011) in their practices with experience and time. Support network and community integration represented the role of FCC services in making families aware of their existing resources via tools such as an ecomaps (García-Grau et al, 2019) and facilitating and fostering families' relationships with other families and accessing community supports (Mahoney & O'Sullivan, 1990).…”

Effectiveness of a Family‐focused Early Intervention Program in the Education of Children with Hearing Impairments Living in Rural Areas

“…Programs prepared as individualised family education programs should be flexible and accessible and take into consideration the different characteristics of families in the program (Brotherson, Brady, & Tagher, 1993).…”