A co-designed website (FindWays) to improve mental health literacy of parents of children with mental health problems: Protocol for a pilot randomised controlled trial

Daniel Peyton; Greg Wadley; Naomi Hackworth; Anneke Grobler; Harriet Hiscock

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0273755

A co-designed website (FindWays) to improve mental health literacy of parents of children with mental health problems: Protocol for a pilot randomised controlled trial

PLoS One. 2023 Mar 21;18(3):e0273755. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273755. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Daniel Peyton^{1

2}, Greg Wadley³, Naomi Hackworth^{4

5

6}, Anneke Grobler^{2

6}, Harriet Hiscock^{1

2

7}

Affiliations

¹ Health Services and Economics, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
² Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
³ School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
⁴ Judith Lumley Centre, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.
⁵ Parenting Research Centre, East Melbourne, Australia.
⁶ Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Parkville, Australia.
⁷ Health Services Research Unit, The Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Abstract

Background: Mental health problems, such as behavioural and emotional problems, are prevalent in children. These problems can have long lasting, detrimental effects on the child, their parents and society. Most children with a mental health problem do not receive professional help. Those that do get help can face long wait times. While waiting, parents want to learn how they can help their child. To address this need, we co-designed a new website to help parents find ways of helping their child's mental health problem while waiting to get specialist help.

Objectives: To assess the acceptability and feasibility of a new co-designed website, FindWays, through a pilot randomised controlled trial. The protocol is registered with ISRCTN (ISRCTN64605513).

Methods: This study will recruit up to 60 parents of children aged two-twelve years old referred to a paediatrician for behavioural and/or emotional problems. Participants will be randomly allocated by computer generated number sequence to either the intervention or control group. Intervention group participants will receive access to the FindWays website to help them manage their child's mental health problem while they wait to see the paediatrician. Acceptability and feasibility will be assessed over the 4-month intervention through mixed methods including: recruitment, adherence, retention, net promoter score (quantitative measures) and semi-structured interviews to gain an in-depth understanding of parents' experience and potential adverse effects (qualitative measure). Secondary outcomes measured by parent survey at 4-months post randomisation include child mental health, parent mental health, impact of the child's mental health problem on their functioning and family, and health service use and associated costs.

Results: Recruitment commenced June 2022 with publication expected in October 2023.

Conclusion: This study will provide novel data on the acceptability and feasibility of a new website co-designed with parents to help them find ways of managing their child's behaviour and emotions.

Copyright: © 2023 Peyton et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Clinical Trial Protocol
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Child
Child, Preschool
Health Literacy*
Humans
Mental Health*
Parents / psychology
Pilot Projects
Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
Surveys and Questionnaires

Grants and funding

The authors would like to thank the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (https://www.mcri.edu.au/research/research-areas/population-health) and Charity Drive Days (https://charitydrivedays.com.au/) for funding support in designing and building the FindWays website. DP is supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship (APP1189935). HH is supported by NHMRC Practitioner Fellowship Award (APP1136222). https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/ The Victorian Government’s Operational Infrastructure Support Program supported research at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.