Introducing an evidence based intervention: exploring the experience of collaboration between front-line and specialist practitioners. A thematic analysis

Introduction: The impact of abuse and neglect on a child, their family and the associated societal costs are well documented. Despite this, there are a limited number of evidence based interventions (EBIs) that are available for families when abuse and neglect is identified and little available guidance for how EBIs should be introduced into existing services. This often results in a gap between the research evidence and clinical practice. Literature focusing on introducing EBIs into existing services identifies collaboration between professionals as a key part of this process. The current research aimed to understand the factors that help and hinder the process of collaboration when an EBI was introduced into an existing service, so that these findings might be applied to other intervention and contexts. Method: This process of collaboration was explored with front-line and specialist practitioners, when an EBI for child abuse and neglect: Multi-Systemic Therapy for Child Abuse and Neglect (MST-CAN), was introduced into Leeds Children’s Social Work Services. Eleven semi-structured interviews were carried out with participants from the social work (n = 6) and MST-CAN team (n = 5). The qualitative data was analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Three key themes emerged from the analysis that described the process of collaboration: ‘adapting the intervention to the local context’, ‘committing to the intervention’ and ‘working together to deliver the intervention’. MST-CAN had to be adapted to fit the local context and practitioners had to commit to the intervention before they could begin working together to deliver it. There were ten sub subthemes from the analysis that related to factors that helped and hindered collaboration between professionals. Discussion: The findings of the current research mirrored some of those from previous research and presented new findings in relation to factors that help and hinder collaboration in the context of children’s social care. The results are considered in relation to models of collaboration, implications for clinical work and future research.