Newsletter May 2025
Partnership for Change - Trial Recruitment
First a quick recap of our study aims! We want to find out how best to support families with young children who have support services. We are particularly interested in exploring the effectiveness of Infant Parent Support (IPS) a new service which is offered by NSPCC, that we are developing in partnership with parent and practitioners stakeholders. We do not know which approach is better and want to be fair as possible so some families in the study will work with IPS while others will continue to work solely with established services. We will compare IPS with the existing health and social services which would be received by families with support services.
Bromley recruitment - Plans are underway to develop a referral pathway with the Bromley Early Intervention Team. We've begun to get some non-randomised cases into built on our learning about families and the pathway through this route.
Glasgow recruitment - A lot of work has been underway over the last few months to agree referral routes through HSCP (Health and Social Care Partnership) support services. There are many governance approvals to be agreed and sought including data sharing agreements and local ethical procedures but we are making slow and steady progress!
Partnerships
Two successful workshops were held looking at the barriers and facilitators to social care research supported by our feasibility funder, Foundations in Bromley and Glasgow. Many stakeholders attended, including Bromley Council, Oxleas Foundations Trust, Bromley Y - Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing Service, Bromley Healthcare, Glasgow link-workers, Glasgow HSCP, Shettleston Housing Association, alongside Partnership for Change Team of NSPCC developmental managers, IPS Practitioners and the research team from University of Glasgow.
We look forward to sharing the report from the day with you shortly.
Ethics and Governance
We have received our third round of feedback from our University sponsor representative and are working through this. The feedback covers our participant and stakeholder documents, protocol amendments, privacy notices, safeguarding and data flow processed in order to receive the approvals to begin recruitment for the definitive RCT (Randomised Control Trial). We've also been having meetings with Glasgow NSCP and South London Research Network to progress site specific areas.
Parent Collaborator Work
Sharon Graham has been working with the new PPIE (Patient and Public Involvement Engagement) lead for MVLS (College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow) to raise the profile of our work and the importance of co-production in research to inform service design. She continues to build on and develop relationships with local and national conferences and engagement third sector and statutory events to recruit parent collaborators who can use their own families' experience of support services to help us better understand what works or doesn't work when helping families wherever they are in their support journey. If you are a parent with this experience or know of services who may be able to help in Sharon's work please contact her at mvls-partnershipforchange@glasgow.ac.uk.
NSPCC and IPS Team
A big welcome to Arlene Murdoch, new Team Manager of the Glasgow Infant and Family Team (GIFT). Arlene has been working within the team as a social worker so we are delighted that she has been appointed to the management position. The post of Partnership Development Manager has also been filled by Shauna Caskie who started with the NSPC at the beginning of April 2025. Laura Kerr has been appointed as Clinical Lead for GIFT. Laura previously worked as as Clinical Psychologist in GIFT, so is very familiar with the service and early developments of IPS. We also welcome Annie Graham as a new Family Engagement Worker in London Infant and Family Team (LIFT).
Staff in both Glasgow and London Infant and Family Teams are working hard to establish new referral pathways and have started to see some relevant non-randomised referrals coming through, especially from the perinatal services in Bromley.
Glasgow Team
We are delighted to welcome two new members of the University of Glasgow Team who joined in April - Noel Talbot, Family Recruitment Assistant, and Ciara MacLaverty, Team Administrator. An advert has also gone out for another Family Recruitment Assistant post in Glasgow. We've been working on a training and development plan to support the recruitment team for these exciting new roles.
Anne Burns has had her role as Recruitment Manager extended for the duration of the study.
Process Evaluation Work
A huge amount of work has been undertaken by the University of Glasgow researchers, Lindsay Dalgarno and Jaycee Pownall, in this area to area to fine tune how we capture learning across the trial, in the NSPCC workstreams and building relationships with stakeholders to understand the place-based landscape of families' needs, stressors and services.
Coming up next
London Partnership Opportunity Event - A follow-up event talk place on 28th April 2025 for potential London partners to hear more about Partnership for Change. We are no asking interested parties to complete a 'readiness assessment' which will help them to identify how ready they would be to engage in Partnership for Change and will identify new partners over the summer.
Development Day - The next Partnerhip for Change development day will be in London on 19th June 2025 with NSPCC practitioners and development team and the University research team (it alternates between Glasgow and London) and our collaborators. We have asked participants what they would like to talk about via a survey, some ideas that have been put forward so far are the voice of the infant, trauma-informed work as part of intervention development and communications.