BRIGHT Coaching: A Developmental Coach System to Empower Families of Preschoolers with Developmental Delays

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The Research Team
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Healthy children develop critical skills during the preschool years. But children with developmental delays may struggle in the development of such skills. For parents, accessing the best diagnostic and interventional care and the best services during this important period of their child’s development is often difficult. This study asks whether a standardized and nationally available online education tool and coaching resource is feasible and helpful to parents as their preschool child transitions to school entry.

The team provided a project update at the 2022 CHILD-BRIGHT Virtual Symposium. View it here.

Research theme:
BRIGHT Futures:
Projects that will redesign health care services to be more responsive to family needs

Age range:
1 ½ to 4 ½ years of age (18 to 54 months)

Start date:
January 2017

Principal Investigators:
Dr. Annette Majnemer, McGill University Health Centre
Dr. Maureen O'Donnell, Child Health BC

2020-21 Project Update

A mom is welcoming her son home from school with open arms — Read our 2020-21 update

2019-20 Project Update

This year, we made great strides in recruiting parents of preschool children with emerging developmental delays and in delivering our coaching program to participants.

In March 2020, we reached the halfway mark in our recruitment goal of 350 participants, 20 per cent of whom are fathers. Our parent advisors were instrumental in preparing recruitment materials, including a video about the program.

Participants who complete our program report high levels of satisfaction. One participant shared: “It improved my daily life; I was able to talk about things. When I went to appointments I wasn’t lost, I was able to voice my opinion.”

To share what we learn as we conduct research, in 2019-20 we published:

Our research protocol, including a description of our randomized control trial
A systematic review of the available evidence on the effectiveness of health coaching for parents of children with disabilities
An assessment of our coaches’ fidelity in delivering the program using our CO-FIDEL (COaches Fidelity in Intervention DELivery) rating tool
An assessment of patient engagement from researcher and parent advisor perspectives, using the Public And Patient Engagement Evaluation Tool (PPEET).

Following our use of the PPEET, the CHILD-BRIGHT Measuring Patient Engagement Working Group implemented the tool to evaluate engagement in the network at large.