Special Parenting and the Combined Skills Model

Abstract

Background The Child and Special Parenting Service provides flexible assessment, long‐term domiciliary support and home‐based teaching to intellectually disabled parents. It provides key coordination between the Learning Disability Service and the Children's Service with focussed parenting assessments, where issues of child care and protection proceedings arise. Method Semi‐structured interviews and questionnaires were designed to evaluate user satisfaction for both recipients of the service and professionals referring to the service. Results A high level of consumer satisfaction was found and assessment reports were highly rated. The service is seen to help prevent family breakdown, to meet user needs and to be supportive and non‐threatening by the parents. Conclusions The combined skills model proposes a small, specialized service that acts as a linchpin for complex cases that require skills from both child and learning disability workers. The Child and Special Parenting Service receives an increasing demand for assessment. It is highly valued by the users and works strongly from an inter‐agency standpoint, coordinating complex packages of domiciliary assessment and support, and is a good practice model.