Specialist early parenting intervention: Effectiveness of a novel nurse-led approach for rural families

Background: Rural Australian families report lower access to specialist early parenting services than urban families. To address the early parenting needs of rural families with children aged 0-3, a novel specialist-nursing early parenting service, Tresillian To You, was implemented for five rural communities in New South Wales, Australia. This study aimed to investigate the initial impact and reach of the service. Methods: Convenience sampling was used to recruit 36 parents who attended the service. Of these, 34 completed structured pre-and-post intervention phone interviews. Additional data were collected from the parent and child health record. Data were imported into SPSS for descriptive and inferential data analysis. Findings: All parent participants were mothers, with a mean age of 31.5 (SD 4.582). Sleep and settling was the primary reason for referral (78%, n = 28). Following service engagement, statistically significant improvements were seen in parent adjustment (95% CI = -1.71, -0.52, p < .001), parent comprehensibility (95% CI = -1.81, -0.42, p = .003), and parent perception of child sleep (95% CI = 16.3, 34.9, p < .001). Families from non-target communities (n = 15) reported a higher level of need at baseline, compared with families from target rural communities (n = 21). Following service engagement, a similar level of benefit was reported between both groups. Discussion: Preliminary evidence suggests that this new service may be an effective method of providing specialist early parenting intervention for families in rural communities. Practice implications: The provision of effective nurse-led specialist early child and family interventions may help to alleviate early parenting difficulty for rural families, leading to improvements in child and family outcomes. (c) 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).