Over the past three years, the Co-Creating Evidence study (CCE) has been exploring best practices in the delivery of community-based wraparound programs that support pregnant and parenting women with substance use concerns in Canada. The CCE team recently published an article about how the partnerships fostered and maintained by community-based wraparound programs make a difference in their work and are in fact a best practice.
The CCE project team interviewed 60 partners and 108 staff of the eight programs involved in the CCE study. The interviews focused on the nature and benefits of interagency and cross-sectoral partnerships. The study found that these programs most commonly formed partnerships with child welfare and health services such as primary care, public health, mental health services and maternal addictions programmes, yet they also partnered to some degree with housing, income assistance, Indigenous cultural programming, infant development and legal services.
Key benefits of partnerships identified were:
- improved access by clients to health and social care that addresses social determinants of health. This access includes expanded programming in the program sites, increased understanding of partners’ services, and greater ease of referral to other supports and programs as needed by clients.
- increased knowledge on the part of both the interagency partners and the wraparound service providers about the experiences that women face, such as the significance of poverty and trauma to women’s substance use. In turn this positively promotes non-judgemental and trauma-informed approaches with pregnant women and new mothers, as well as provision of more multifaceted and paced supports to address their needs.
- improved child welfare outcomes. The program level relationships with child welfare workers, and in some cases integration of a social worker onsite, results in increased planning for positive mother-child outcomes during the pregnancy, improved mother-child connections after birth and reduced likelihood of the infant being removed from the woman’s care at birth.
- strengthened cultural safety within the programming and (re)connection to culture by women. Partnerships with Indigenous organizations enhances learning by program providers about how to work in a culturally safe way and increased opportunities for referral to Indigenous programming for those women interested in connecting to their culture as a part of their wellness/recovery.
“The programmes participating in the Co-Creating Evidence study were both creative and flexible when developing partnerships, seeking opportunities in areas in which they did not have the resources or expertise, as well as with services with whom they had a common cause, for example mutual clients, a shared desire to ‘wrap support’ around women to meet their evolving needs and aligned approaches (harm reduction, trauma informed practice).”
Hubberstey, C., Rutman, D., Van Bibber, M., & Poole, N. (2021). Wraparound programmes for pregnant and parenting women with substance use concerns in Canada: Partnerships are essential Health and Social Care in the Community https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hsc.13664
The partnerships continue to evolve through dialogue, collaboration and communication. What the study has identified is how, through these partnerships, wraparound program providers are contributing to the reduction of fragmentation between the health, child welfare and addictions fields – and in turn to important benefits for clients in terms of access to care and enduring connections with their children. In the work on prevention of FASD, it has repeatedly been emphasized how important the role of “Level 3 and 4” programming is, particularly in how such programs attend to the range of determinants of women’s health and alcohol use. Clearly it is in part through partnership work that FASD prevention is achieved.
Retrieved from https://fasdprevention.wordpress.com/2022/01/04/how-interagency-and-cross-sectoral-partnerships-are-contributing-to-prevention-of-fasd/
