EVALUATING FAMILY-CENTERED SERVICE USING A MEASURE OF PARENTS PERCEPTIONS

This article describes the use of a newly-developed measure of parents ' perceptions of-health care providers' behaviours (Measure of Process es of Care MPOC) to evaluate the family centredness of children's reha bilitation services. The measure was developed with the participation of more than 1600 parents of children with chronic neurodevelopmental conditions throughout Ontario. It assesses five domains: enabling and partnership; providing general information; providing specific informa tion about the child; coordinated and comprehensive care; and respectf ul and supportive care. By comparing the perceptions of parents receiv ing services from three different types of organizations or programmes , we demonstrated that the MPOC can pick up differences between parent s in their experiences of caregiving. We also demonstrated that the MP OC is able to detect differences in how parents view the family-centre dness of services provided by individual centres. The data indicate th at the MPOC has appreciable utility in providing programmes and servic es with a description of their current level of family-centred service as perceived by parents. The strengths, limitations and potential use s of the measure in other contexts are discussed.