PCHC nurse, SPARK, risk assessment, parenting problems, child development.

Abstract

Title: Influential factors of nurses’ risk assessment for parenting and developmental problems by 18 months old children.

Background: For advice and support about raising children, parents can go to Preventive Child Health Care (PCHC). Since it is important to detect parenting and/or developmental problems at an early age, PCHC nurses assess if a child has a low, increased or high risk for these problems. PCHC nurses want more knowledge which factors influence the risk assessment.

Research question: How do parental demographic characteristics, perceived needs for support and balance factors - as measured with the Structured Problem Analysis of Raising Kids (SPARK) - influence the risk assessment from a PCHC nurse on parenting and developmental problems by children of 18 months old? Method: A secondary data analysis was conducted by using SPARK-data of 3895 participants, collected in the period December 2006 to January 2008. Ordinal regression analyses were used to gain insight in the associations between variables and the risk assessment.

Results: Most variables turned out to be significant, most influential were the variables ‘employment father’ and ‘type of household’. Furthermore, the factors ‘family issues’, ‘developmental stimulation’, ‘hygiene of the home’ and ‘hygiene of the family members’ have great influence.

Conclusion: Study results shows the most influential variables belong to family and living environment. The balance factors are most influential. These findings match with previous research.

Recommendations: An overview of the results of this study could be handed out to all PCHC nurses and used in SPARK-training, to pay extra attention to these factors when conducting the SPARK. Further research could be aimed at other provinces of the Netherlands to see if this will result in the same influential factors.