Partnership for Change: RCT of Infant Parent Support teams to address place-based inequalities for struggling families

Through our parent-practitioner-community (PPC) partnership, consisting of parents with children involved with social work, infant mental health practitioners, researchers, and community stakeholders, we have coproduced Infant Parent Support teams (IPS), in Glasgow and London. IPS are mental health teams offering high quality therapeutic interventions to struggling families. IPS teams aim to reduce the risk of child maltreatment (CM) and improve parent and child mental health. In this study, we propose to further develop the place-based features of IPS teams and test the clinical and cost-effectiveness of IPS in a definitive randomised controlled trial (RCT).

Place-based inequalities in health begin early in childhood: young children experiencing poverty and/or racism are more likely to develop health problems earlier in the lifespan than their peers. Children in the most deprived 10% of small UK neighbourhoods are over 10 times more likely to be in care or on protection plans than children in the least deprived 10%. Social determinants of health and child welfare are "systemic, population-based, cyclical and intergenerational" resulting in certain geographical areas being plagued by overlapping physical and mental health problems and addictions. Infants and preschool children rely on parents and practitioners access services - a process vulnerable to structural inequalities. Our novel aim is to redress this.

Our coproduction has led to enhancements of IPS, including neurodevelopmental awareness, poverty awareness, and the employment of parents as practitioners and managers in IPS, and we have mapped the local contexts in which the IPS teams are embedded. We are currently conducting a feasibility randomised controlled trial (f-RCT) investigating how best to involve the families who can benefit most from IPS.

In this new study, consisting of four work packages (WPs), we aim to reduce place-based inequalities through: WP1, co-creating a new theory of change for...