CPERL Publication Alert: Early Intervention Stakeholder Perspectives of Family-Centered Care Coordination – A Pilot Study

CPERL members collaborate with colleagues from the Colorado School of Public Health to publish a pilot study in Topics in Early Childhood Special Education.

CPERL team members Mary, Carla, and Lauren worked with colleagues from the Colorado School of Public Health to publish on a second phase of pilot work, "Early Intervention Stakeholder Perspectives of Family-Centered Care Coordination: A Pilot Study."  The pilot phase was undertaken to build readiness for an Agency for Healthcare Research Quality (AHRQ) R01 scale-up. This pilot work builds a conceptual model of family-centered care coordination within the EI context, which was refined in the scale-up phase. The scale-up employed a convergent mixed-methods study using a case study framework, to examine family-centered care coordination mechanisms in early intervention across multiple states.

This pilot phase of work has been accepted for publication in Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, a milestone for this team, which has been striving to publish its work in this type of venue for some time.

Our colleague Natalie Murphy shares, "This article... elevates the voices of people who work in and receive Part C Early Intervention services everyday in a novel way by asking them about their own experiences, which are extremely relevant to the larger picture of service coordination and delivery. Participants in this study continually thanked us for doing this work, recognizing its importance, and often the interviews went over the allotted time because they had so much to tell us. Participants also frequently asked how the results would be acted on, which signals to me that they felt their voices were truly heard, and they were seeking change. Secondly, it sets the foundation for future work in this area. We learned so much from this pilot study that we were able to better craft a larger scale-up to include service coordinators' voices, to drill down deep in two states rather than casting a wider net to more states, and to understand what recruitment practices actually work in this space, among other important concepts that were incorporated into the design."