Implementation of a community-based family-centered program in Portugal: a multiple case study evaluation

Abstract

Family-centered, community-based programs are particularly suited to support families with at-risk children or maltreated children and achieve family preservation or reunification. In these child protection and child welfare cases, assessment is of great importance to inform decision making. But the implementation of services to support the families change and its evaluation in real settings is not without challenges. The Integrated Family Assessment and Intervention Model (IFAIM) was designed to conduct assessment and intervention with multichallenged families with at-risk or maltreated children and support the activities of the child protection system. In this article, we describe a pragmatic, focused on improvement, action research multicase study of the process and outcome of IFAIM's first implementation. Multiple factors affected implementation, namely, factors related with the teams, the organizations, and the communities. An improved model of implementation based on the evaluation results is proposed.