ENabling VISions And Growing Expectations
Enrollment for ENVISAGE SP is OPEN!
We wish to engage with service providers (SPs) who work with children with developmental challenges, delays or disabilities and their families. Our aim is to evaluate a series of five online workshops for service providers.
See more here.
If you want to join, please contact
Debbie Hughes (Canada): envisage@mcmaster.ca
Miriam Yates (Australia): sp.envisage@mcri.edu.au
Learn more here.
What is ENVISAGE-SP?
Contemporary ideas about health and service delivery – most particularly the World Health Organization (WHO)’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and principles of family-centred service – represent significant paradigm shifts and expansions in the approach to research and service delivery for children with child-onset neurodevelopmental disability (NDD) and their families. These shifts challenge SPs to endorse a more holistic, strengths-based, function-promoting, family-centred approach to children’s health and development. Over the last two decades, researchers have begun to study and write about the implications of these changes at the family, clinical, research, organizational, and policy levels. Sadly, despite an ever-increasing evidence base, there remains a substantial gap in the adoption of these contemporary ideas in practice. It has long been apparent that how services are delivered can impact child and family health, development, and well-being.
Building on extensive feedback from parents in the ENVISAGE-Families program, we have now created and are testing ENVISAGE for Service Providers (E-SP). The goals of ENVISAGE-SP are to make ENVISAGE concepts easily accessible to SPs, and offer insights into how SPs can bring these ENVISAGE concepts to life in their clinical work with children with disabilities and their families. ENVISAGE-SP has the potential to enhance SPs' practice by providing them with a vehicle and tools for how to better support families, preventing, or at least reducing, the levels of identified challenges and stress that families experience. ENVISAGE-SP is currently being offered as a research program of 5 weekly meetings, with the hope that it can be made widely available once proof of concept has been established.
How can I get involved?
The ENVISAGE research program is ready to be studied! At present, we are recruiting service providers to take part in the five workshops and tells us what they think. Time commitment is 5 weekly sessions including 1 hour pre-workshop preparation on your own time & 1 hour online small group Zoom session.
To learn more about this study, please see our recruitment poster below and contact the research coordinator.
Debbie Hughes (Canada): envisage@mcmaster.ca
Miriam Yates (Australia): sp.envisage@mcri.edu.au
Disability: Perception of Professionals and Parents
In this video podcast, Dr. Peter Rosenbaum talks about his editorial, 'You have textbooks; we have story books'. Disability as perceived by professionals and parents . The idea of this editorial came from Elizabeth Chambers, a parent who believes in the value of knowing a child or youth with disabilities beyond labels and diagnoses. "He's not found in one textbook, he is a story book. And you have to let him tell you the story and the family around you," says Elizabeth.