Our Family Support and Practitioner Training – Now Available Online
Most of our family support sessions and practitioner training courses are now available online
Since the start of the pandemic, HENRY has been adapting our family support programmes and workshops, our local services, and our practitioner training courses to be delivered in small, facilitated groups via online platforms such as Zoom. We’ve applied the same sense of rigour that we always do to ensure the same quality of experience that you would expect from HENRY.
Parents have responded well to online delivery and we’re seeing some encouraging benefits from delivering online, including parents who would not normally be able to attend in person now joining groups, fewer missed sessions, and many more Dads getting involved.
We’ve reduced the length of some sessions to avoid screen-fatigue, but to make up for it we’ve created additional video content to support the sessions.
One parent told us following an online programme “We have changed our eating habits and are exercising more. I am able to cope with difficult situations and am more confident about the best way to deal with them.”
We are closely monitoring the outcomes to ensure that our online delivery replicates as closely as possible the benefits that families experience through face-to-face sessions. But initial analysis of the data so far is encouraging, with improvements to overall family wellbeing comparing well to our in-person delivery.
Our two main Healthy Families programmes are now adapted for online, as well as our Starting Solids workshop. We’ll be introducing other workshops soon, including Eating well for less. Our infant feeding, oral health and speech & language services have also moved online.
Finally, our practitioner training is also now available online. We’ve moved to multiple sessions over several weeks. A benefit of this approach is that practitioners can apply their new skills in a real-world context and then bring their experiences and reflections back to the group to share with all participants. One practitioner said ‘it’s as close to the experience of in-person training as it could possibly be. I can’t wait to deliver the programmes for families in my local area now’.