WONDERbabies Partnership for Health (Ways Of Nurturing Development through Enhancing Relationships)

Ayelet Talmi, PhD, University of Colorado Denver

Description

With support from The Colorado Trust, the WONDERbabies Partnership for Health exists to coordinate, link, plan, design and implement a system of care for babies and young children with special health care and developmental needs and their families. WONDERbabies Partnership for Health hopes to improve the communication and coordination of systems and services for young children with special health care needs and their families through systems building and change, education and training, and data collection and evaluation.

Using PARTNER, WONDERbabies is conducting a social network analysis to look at relationships among families and stakeholders in the system of care for babies and young children with special health care and developmental needs in Colorado. To date, 723 partnerships among 450 stakeholders have been identified and analyzed.

Work Influenced by PARTNER

The PARTNER results showed us how services for children with special health care needs differ vastly between counties in Colorado, and so we modified the WONDERbabies website to be more user-friendly for families trying to navigate services (i.e., they click on the county they live in and a list of services available to their specific county comes up). We’ve also applied for grants to continue our systems work, with the intention of providing guidance for this type of systems research in other state, regional, and national service areas, identifying outstanding research questions, and discussing the practical/policy implications of these findings. In addition, we proposed a Quality Improvement toolkit based on findings from partner that will provide a “feedback loop” to practitioners working to improve systems of care. The final goal of the project is to have a validated, viable, and easily-assessable tool for use by the practice community. After the toolkit is validated, it will be made available on a website in electronic form. The toolkit will be “offered” to all PARTNER users, to accompany their data collection process.

Contact information

www.wonderbabiesco.org
info@wonderbabiesco.org
Mandi Millar, WONDERbabies Project Coordinator
303.724.7667
13121 E 17th Ave., C234, Aurora, CO 80045

Products Using PARTNER Data

WONDERbabies Partnership for Health Poster

Testimonial

Working with Dr. Danielle Varda and using the PARTNER tool transformed the work our collaborative (a Partnership for Health Initiative funded by The Colorado Trust) was doing. We moved from having an anecdotal understanding of the system of care for babies and young children with special health care and developmental needs to being able to empirically characterize the system, quantify relationships among stakeholders and participants in the system, and evaluate systems change as a result of our colloborative efforts. In collaboration with Dr. Varda, we have developed an approach that allows us to better understand how the personal networks created by families to meet their children’s needs correspond to the system of care developed by agencies and organizations. Using data from the social network analysis has inspired conversations and innovations about how to create a comprehensive, coordinated, and family-centered system for young children and their families.

Ayelet Talmi, PhD
WONDERbabies Partnership for Health
University of Colorado Denver