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Flexibility of Programme Delivery in Providing Effective Family-centred Intervention for Remote Families

Abstract Equity of service delivery to families of children with hearing loss is an important outcome that is sometimes difficult to achieve. With the current philosophy of family centred practice, questions arise as to how service can be delivered, how equitable that service might be, and how the quality of service may or may not be affected. There were two aims of this study. The first was to investigate beliefs and values around family-centred practice through examining professional beliefs about children, parents and how they could work with families. The second was to investigate how the mode of programme delivery might be associated with outcomes for families. This was done through measuring families' ratings of their own family functioning. Participants included 27 professionals from an early intervention programme for children with hearing loss and 24 families receiving services from the same programme (n = 16 metro; n = 8 rural). Results showed that professionals showed evidence of strong beliefs in most aspects of family-centred practice. They reported that they believed in practice that fostered partnerships, and that they were most effective when they worked with parents rather than directly providing child therapy. All families were satisfied with the intervention they had received and rated themselves highly on family functioning. For rural families the problem of distance from the centre was not an issue since the programme had adopted a flexible service delivery approach. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.