FRAIT International Impact

July 2024

On the 8th and 9th July 2024, the FRAIT team hosted webinars on ‘Developing and understanding family resilience across the globe in the 21st century’. 77 people registered for the event and came from Cameroon, Scotland, Singapore, Australia (Perth, Sidney, western Australia), India, Wales and England.

Chaired by Prof. Carolyn Wallace it included presentations from Wales, Canada, India, Singapore and Australia. The team had first planned this event some four years ago as a face to face event on the 30th March 2020. Following a lecture tour in January 2024 to Singapore and Australia Prof. Wallace was able to rekindle those relationships and interests in delivering the webinar. In the event we were reminded that the family is not an island but sits within a system where neighbourhoods, communities, professionals, organisations and government should be working together using a strengths based approach to build resilience.   

In opening the event Carolyn said:  

‘Today we appreciate more than ever that families are the bedrock of society. Its where we learn how to love and how to live. How to behave when we go about our daily routines, how we interact with one another and how we behave in our communities and the wider society.

For most of us its where we learn how to cope with the stress of everyday life, where we learn about resilience, not just as individuals, but as families together. So when adverse events come along such as the pandemic or family health issues or socioeconomic factors such as being able to have enough family income to pay the bills we learn how to weather the storms and how to prepare to bounce back from any future stressful experiences’.

In response to this Dr Michelle Thomas gave a presentation on the ‘Development of FRAIT in Wales’, explaining how working with health visitors in Wales following a tragic house fire where two children died resulted in the University of South Wales team working across Wales to develop the FRAIT: www.frait.wales 

The original FRAIT has now been developed into a digital format and a self-assessment form. There are plans to test eFRAIT and the self-assessment form usability in practice in a health board in Wales. Dr Greg Anderson (Canada) helped us to reflect on the evolving concept of resilience and to understand that creating resilience includes not only the individual and the family but also the workplace. He talked about the need for a shift in mindset from the individual but towards a multi-system approach where people need support to be connected.

Dr Sylvia Choo and Ms Lydea Gn (SingHealth) Singapore spoke about ‘Family Resilience in the little red dot- current directions and initiatives’ and how important it was to have government support and strategic direction to empower professionals to support families and connect them to their communities.

Whilst the team from AIIMS Rishikesh in India, Dr Ajeet and Dr Vartika with support from Emeritus Prof David Pontin who spoke about ‘Developing FRAIT India’ and the challenges of working with the Asha workers in rural India, trying to ensure that their voices were heard accurately through Hindi translation to English.

Anitha Livingstone (PhD candidate) presented her published article ‘Teaching real world qualitative research using FRAIT’. Here she reflected on using consensus methods in workshops with  MPH students in AIIMS Rishikesh.

Finally, Distinguished Professor Lynn Kemp (Australia) spoke about ‘Supporting families to realise aspirations, potential and ‘bounce forward’: The MECSH programme’ which she developed and is now being used in Australia, England and the USA Effectiveness | Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness (hhs.gov). She reflected that whilst she considered the stressors of life as learning opportunities the MECSH was a programme of tailored support to scaffold a family whilst they worked through the crisis and learned how to cope for the future. She could see the MESCH being used in response to a FRAIT assessment as they both used a strengths-based approach.

Participant comments included "A fantastic and informative webinar, thank you very much indeed’" and, "Thank you everyone - really interesting and thought provoking sessions, I enjoyed them all. You are all involved in excellent work, good to see how the collaborations are working."