Evaluation of the Incredible Years Hawke’s Bay Parenting Programme as a Model of Interagency Collaboration: Report for the Incredible Years Hawke’s Bay Stewardship Group, by Penny Ehrhardt & Sharon Coulton, EIT (2013)

Executive Summary
The main focus of the Incredible Years Parenting programme is to train and support parents to develop good relationships with their children and strengthen families.  In the Hawke’s Bay, the Incredible Years Parenting Programme is delivered collaboratively by Child, Adolescent and Family Services (CAFS); Hawke’s Bay District Health Board’s (the DHB), Special Education; Ministry of Education, Family Works, Birthright and the Napier Family Centre.

This report evaluates the collaborative model of programme stewardship and delivery used by Incredible Years Hawke’s Bay and the impact of this on programme participation and retention rates.    It also evaluates strategies used by Incredible Years Hawke’s Bay to engage underserved populations.

Key findings are:

• Incredible Years Hawke’s Bay was been highly effective in retaining participants.  In 2010/2011, 68.3 percent of Hawke’s Bay participants completed the programme (measured as attendance at 76 percent or more of all sessions) compared to 51.0 percent nationally.
• Improvements in participants’ Eyberg scores were above the national average in the 2010/2011 period.
• Incredible Years Hawke’s Bay’s collaborative governance and delivery structures are carefully planned.
• Elements of collaborative governance and delivery included shared programme planning, cross-agency co-facilitation of groups (targeted and general), joint training, joint supervision, joint workforce planning and joint evaluation.
• There is a high degree of congruence between the values modelled in the programme, and the values evident in the collaborative governance and delivery process.
• Interviewees were passionate about both the programme and collaborative governance and delivery. Agencies were convinced of the worth of Incredible Years and the collaboration.
• A Stewardship Group consisting of one or more manager and facilitator from each agency functions as the governance and strategic-decision making arm of the collaboration.
• A Facilitators’ Group deals with practice issues and provides collegial support for facilitators across agencies.
• A cross-over in membership of the Stewardship and Facilitators’’ groups means there is a conduit for issues to be escalated for resolution, and information to be communicated.
• Resourcing requirements were clearly understood by agencies.  The Incredible Years programme is time-intensive and if any agency was to inadequately resource its facilitators this would pose a risk to the collaboration as a whole.
• Collaboration takes time.  Group participants needed to travel to meetings. Agendas and minutes needed to be prepared, distributed and read.  All involved were aware of the need to run the collaborative process efficiently.  Maintaining this focus is critical to retaining the buy-in necessary to make the collaboration work.

Areas for possible further development of Incredible Years Hawke’s Bay include:

• Ensuring continued active participation on the Stewardship Group by at least one manager with decision-making authority from each collaborating agency
• Evaluating targeted programmes run to date
• Engaging and delivering the programme to families needing intensive support, possibly through more targeted programmes
• Ensuring the collaboration continues to be cohesive, despite one agency no longer running programmes in collaboration with the others
• Actively seeking Maori and Pasifika agency involvement in the collaboration, and
• Managing referrals and the waiting list.

The Incredible Years Hawke’s Bay collaborative approach provides a model that can potentially be used for the cross-agency delivery of other social, educational and health service programmes.  Key features in replicating the model may include:

• Focusing the collaboration on the delivery of a clearly defined service or programme
• Passion and commitment to the programme from all parties to the collaboration
• Transparent, functional and efficient collaborative structures involving managers with decision-making power and front-line staff, and
• Modelling of collaborative values at all levels of the programme:  congruency of programme content and governance and delivery mechanisms.

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