26 Jul, 2022
The For Baby’s Sake Trust has been working with others to establish a core set of outcomes, indicators and measures to be used when creating, delivering and evaluating programmes to prevent and reduce domestic violence and abuse, whether working with those who use abuse, those experiencing abusive behaviour, children, babies and whole families.
The intention is to drive positive change, innovation, communication and genuine collaboration across professional boundaries and systems and the fragmented fields of early child development and infant mental health, early and earlier intervention, services for complex families and for those experiencing abuse or using abusive behaviours. This has the potential to simplify the landscape and enable better decision-making by those involved in the commissioning, delivery and evaluation of programmes, projects and services for all those impacted by domestic violence and abuse.
With funding from National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Policy Research Unit for Children and Families (CPRU) at University College London (UCL) has led the development of linked Core Outcome Sets for family and child-focused interventions for child maltreatment and domestic violence.
The Trust has been a leading member of the project development team since 2015 and, more recently, within the Steering Group overseeing the UCL-led project which brought together the views of all those involved and affected, including those with lived experience, to form a consensus and the final Core Outcome Sets in September 2021 (in time to influence the development of the new Supporting Families outcomes framework).
Since then, the UCL team and Steering Group successfully applied for Home Office funding to explore how measurement tools in common use currently fit across the domestic abuse Core Outcome Set – this work was completed in March 2022. Most recently, the Home Office has included the need to demonstrate delivery against the Core Outcome Set for Children Affected by Domestic Abuse within proposals for the current round of their Children Affected by Domestic Abuse (CADA) funding.
The Trust is working with the project team to plan the next steps for the project.
