A vital ingredient to ensure successful early child development is for parents to be happy and healthy, so they can raise happy and healthy children.
This has been keenly observed by Dr Sarah Hunter, a Senior Research Fellow in the Healthy Start to Life team within Flinders University’s Caring Futures Institute, and the focus of a three-year joint-appointment she recently completed with Preventative Health SA (previously known as Wellbeing SA), working in partnership with the Caring Futures Institute.
Through co-ordinating the partnership and leading research aligned to CFI’s Healthy Start to Life program, Dr Hunter was able to examine the existing South Australian Early Years System in South Australia to identify ways to better engage and support parents and caregivers for improved child health, development, and wellbeing.
“It’s critical that parents and caregivers receive evidence-based support to ensure not only their own health and wellbeing, but that of their children and broader family,” says Dr Hunter.
This three-year research partnership aimed to understand the complex and diverse ways that parents and caregivers raise children, along with the challenges they face and what support they need to overcome problems.
“The joint-appointment was a great success, because the different stakeholders were able to come together and establish a shared agenda rather than have areas of expertise working in isolation”.
“By coming together and completing the shared projects that we identified, we were able to clearly map where there are gaps in the system, and figure out ways to remedy the shortcomings.”
Over the three years of Dr Hunter’s joint-appointment, set projects were identified and completed each year to help provide practical evidence-based strategies that can help Australian adults in their parenting role. This extended into embedding prevention programs for parental mental health into universal services.
“The outcomes of all these individual projects identified other gaps in the system that we had not seen previously, so we were able to commence valuable projects in the third year that we hadn’t been able to identify when we started the partnership,” says Dr Hunter.
“We were very nimble and very agile to keep applying what we learned as we went on. And we were responsive to the needs that we discovered.
“The transparency of the participating organisations in reaching agreement on our aims for this partnership, and the flexibility everyone showed to adapt and not be so rigid in their ways meant that everyone got the outcomes they needed from this partnership.”
Dr Hunter believes outcomes from the joint-appointment have established a successful blueprint for future joint-appointments to operate at their best.
“It shapes the definition of a true partnership. I don’t believe any university could have done what we achieved in isolation – to provide evidence-informed solutions from global best practise that can inform specific local change. And we were able to pilot new support programs into routine care, which we couldn’t achieve as a university without having State Government involvement.”
While Dr Hunter’s joint-appointment has come to an end, Flinder’s Caring Futures Institute is continuing to work with Preventive Health SA to improve the health and wellbeing of South Australians.
“The relationship continues because Flinders is viewed as a trusted authority in evidence and research,” says Dr Hunter, “and we have a strong track record on working with government departments to deliver results.”