REACH for Kids: Enabling healthy childhoods through Respectful EngAgement, Communication and Help (REACH) for families experiencing adversities

Our project will develop a practical toolkit ‘REACH for Kids’ to enhance nurses’ and midwives’ skills to support families experiencing challenges that impact children’s health and development. Parents are crucial to early childhood health and development, but parents’ ability to raise thriving children can be impacted by challenges like mental/physical ill-health, past trauma, family violence and housing insecurity (1). Almost three quarters of Australian children will be impacted by at least one parental adversity (2-5). These adversities during childhood have lifelong impacts on mental health, development and education and persist intergenerationally when these children become parents themselves (6). For some children, experiences of multiple or severe family adversities means they are removed by child protection, resulting in other harms such as disconnection from family, culture and identity (7). Families experiencing challenges face multiple barriers to seeking support – such as shame, stigma and difficulty navigating services (8, 9). Nurses and midwives are uniquely positioned to support families experiencing these challenges (10). However, nurses and midwives often lack confidence and skills to have non-judgemental conversations and therefore miss opportunities to provide early help (11, 12). Our project will co-design an early support toolkit - REACH for Kids - in partnership with nurses, midwives and parents, to empower nurses and midwives with evidence-based practical strategies for proactive conversations and initiation of early support that mitigates impacts of childhood adversity. This collaborative co-design approach will produce a prototype of REACH for Kids which is acceptable, feasible and ready for translation into practice.