Family Sensitive Practice
What is family sensitive practice?
Family Sensitive Practice has been described variously as ‘a range of practices’ that privilege notions of appropriate and respectful family involvement in clinical management and treatment. It is a culture that promotes and sustains effective working relationships between clients, carers and workers. It is potentially a ‘whole of service’ approach, that extends from the very first contact through to follow-up, and can involve non-clinical as well as clinical staff.
Core Principles of
· Working with family members and other carers is seen as an essential part of a comprehensive response to client care rather than an exclusive specialist activity.
· Problematic AOD use is viewed as a traumatic experience for all involved. Blame, guilt, grief, shame and anger are viewed as normal reactions to such trauma.
· Families are seen as having needs in their own right and as having a right to have their needs acknowledged.
· Families are understood as being motivated by survival rather than malevolence. When family members behave in destructive ways, an appreciation of the family situation can help workers address this destructiveness more effectively.
Best outcomes are seen to be achieved by including the perspectives of consumers, family carers and AOD professionals. Creating conversations between each of these groups provides the greatest potential for optimising health care for individual consumers and families and for service improvement.
The training will support workers to:
· Clarify the different facets of family and systemic individual work
· Understand and address the impact of problematic substance use on family members
· Explore practices that support families in AOD services
· Respond effectively to families coping with a relative engaged with the service for his or her AOD use
· Negotiate the involvement of the family in individual client care
· Facilitate productive meetings with families, including the client.
· Share information about the AOD issue between the client, family members and clinician, and work confidently with confidentiality.
· Document family contact in client files
What does it involve?
Implemenation involves choosing key representatives in the service to form a task group. Two days of initial training would ideally be followed by regular in house meetings to help put your agency’s plan into action within the workplace. This process may involve the completion of regular audits of existing practices within the service, and identification of challenges and barriers.
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