Context
P.I.P.P.I. (Program of Intervention for Prevention of Institutionalization) is a national research-training-intervention program developed in the area of Family Preservation, funded by the Italian Ministry of Welfare and developed by the team of LabRIEF (Scientific Group, SG) as an intensive care program for vulnerable families. It aims at preventing child placement out-of-home and at responding to problems connected to poor parenting and child neglect through an intensive intervention where every family is in charge for about 18 months.
Particular focus is placed on method and tools supporting the intervention process within a participatory and transformative evaluation approach. In P.I.P.P.I. the team around the child (multidisciplinary team, MT) use tools with children and parents in order to give them voice, to collect their story and their points of view on “World of the child” in terms of strengths and needs, and therefore to develop a shared care plan where everyone is a main character of the intervention.
The “World of the child”, based on the Italian adaptation of the triangular models of the Assessment Framework developed in U.K., is the framework and main tool, and gives the structure to the web based tool and database, named RPMonline. It covers the 3 dimensions of child’s need, parental responses to those needs and environment, and it can be used with children and/or with parents in individual, familiar or group settings, and in several active ways according to the creativity of professionals, children and parents.
The first implementation of P.I.P.P.I. in 10 cities (2011-2012) involved 122 children 0-11 years old (89 families); the second one (2013-2014) involved 241 children (166 families), the third one (2014-2015), as the first national scaling up of the program, involved 600 children (453 families) in 50 cities of 19 out 20 Italians Regions.
During the third implementation, 6 families out 453 experienced a placement of their children due to a unexpected event. For these families P.I.P.P.I. was run as Program for Family Reunification instead of Family Preservation.
Objectives, method, results
The main goal of this paper is to highlight two case-studies through a quali-quantitative analysis of data about the assessment and the care plan of each family, collected through RPMonline in three times of the process of intervention, T0, T1 e T2.
The results show:
- how and in which settings it was possible to keep a strong engagement of the families in decision making process before and after the placement of the children;
- how it was rebuilt the care-plan of the children, also through a specific plan of meetings and visits between children and birth families;
- how the MT was integrated by foster families;
- how the “World of the Child” has helped to create a common vision concerning child needs and then to maintain the link between birth families, professionals and foster families;
- how the MT accompanies the families in the period before and after the child placement;
- how the researchers GS accompanies the MT.
Conclusions
The case-study analysis reflects a process of co-analysis between SG, MT, birth and foster families involved in the process. This co-analysis was cobuilt in some “laboratories of reflection on action” that were carried out every 2/3 months all along the implementation process. The reflective process between researchers, professionals and families, turned out into a new care-plan for these families (micro and meso-system), but also produced some new ways to design care plan and collaborative relationships (eso and macro-system) between agencies (for birth families, for children out-of-home and their schools) overcoming the fragmentation that usually characterizes these situations.
