Parental and Professional Views and Competences: Involving Each Other

Background and objectives: Parents of persons with autism often highlight the lack of services and the problematic partnership with professionals. This result was seen in an earlier parental nonrepresentative nationwide survey... [ view full abstract ]

Background and objectives: Parents of persons with autism often highlight the lack of services and the problematic partnership with professionals. This result was seen in an earlier parental nonrepresentative nationwide survey (N=303) in 2009. In this study we focus on the best practices of the partnership with parents of persons with autism from the perspective of professionals.

Methodology: 27 organizations from various (health, education, social etc.) sectors participated in a national project for improving services for persons with autism. As part of the broader project a mixed method research was carried out on the quality of services by semi-structured interviews. Questions were asked on frequent parental demands, stories were collected on the best practices and unsuccessful partnerships, availability of services for parents and families was assessed.

Results: Parental demands showed great complexity in each organization (e.g. instability of future services, dealing with behavioural problems at home etc.). Best practices of the parent-professional partnerships are rather special cases, and according to the content analysis of the professional stories are carried out either by involving the parent in the professional care or by involving the professional in the care at home.

Conclusions: Meeting the complexity of parental claims urges the implementation of interprofessional care models where communication between members of the network will be improved. Parents and professionals should be better informed on the views and competences of their partners about service delivery.