Family-centred service (FCS) is an approach to delivering health services to children and their families that recognizes that each family is unique, that parents are the experts on their children, and that treatments need to consider the needs of the entire family. There is strong evidence that families who experience ‘better’ FCS report better mental health, higher levels of satisfaction, and lower levels of stress in respect of their child’s services. In 1996 researchers at CanChild developed a tool (called Measure of Processes of Care, or MPOC) to measure parents’ experiences with health care services. Since then, MPOC has been used both in Canada and internationally to evaluate services provided by children’s treatment centres, hospitals, and community development programs. However, since MPOC was first created, a lot has changed in healthcare and the way that services are delivered. We have good reason to believe that the original tool may not reflect everything that today’s parents want, need and expect from the way that health services are provided to their children. Based on what we learned about what parents want and expect from healthcare services (from a previous stage of the study), we have developed an up-to-date questionnaire that will reflect, and measure, parents’ and caregivers’ experiences of the delivery of healthcare services. We would now like to test it out to see if it will give us information about the extent to which an organization’s services are family-centred, with feedback given to the organization.
