Assessing parents with mental health difficulties (Family Partnership Model Level 1)

This one-day course for professionals working with adults with mental illness provides a practical resource to use with parents to develop an accurate and shared understanding of their needs and those of their family.

The training is based on the Family Partnership Model, which provides a simple yet effective tool to integrate conversations about parenting into routine assessments.

Over half of children of parents affected by mental health problems develop mental health difficulties themselves. Parents’ own mental health difficulties can make it harder to look after children safely, warmly, and consistently.

Effective assessment of parental mental health and parenting needs can reduce parenting stress, safeguarding risk, and intergenerational transmission of mental health difficulties as well as improve family resilience and children’s social and emotional outcomes.

This course is delivered by leading parenting experts from the Centre for Parent and Child Support (South London and Maudsley NHS Trust). Using the latest evidence, user-based perspectives, practice examples, and participative learning, this course provides learners with an active, engaging, and reflective opportunity to:

• consider the impact of parental mental health on families, including risk and protective factors
• examine the challenges to clinicians and clinical services in exploring and assessing the impact of parental mental health difficulties
• use an evidence-based framework and resources to assess and formulate parenting, child and family strengths, and the needs of parents with mental health difficulties.

If you are interested in further developing your skills in this area, Maudsley Learning and the Centre for Parent and Child Support offer the following advanced programmes:

• Therapeutic working with parents with mental health difficulties (Family Partnership Model Level 2)
• Challenges working with parents with mental health difficulties (Family Partnership Model Level 3).

The Centre for Parent and Child Support believes all practitioners have the right and the responsibility to talk about parental mental health.