Facilitators and Barriers to Implementing a Complex Parent-based Intervention to Prevent Child Mental Health Problems.

Abstract

Mental health problems among children and adolescents are common worldwide and pose substantial challenges for health and welfare services. There is an increasing need for effective interventions to prevent and reduce child mental health problems in Norwegian municipal child and family services. Few such interventions have been implemented and made available for the target group. Supportive Parents - Coping Kids is a novel, transdiagnostic parent-based intervention targeting both internalizing and externalizing symptoms in children. The intervention has been co-created, tested, and refined with relevant stakeholders to promote its acceptability, appropriateness, and feasibility in regular municipal services. Insufficient understanding and consideration of contextual factors, particularly in complex psychosocial interventions like the present one, may contribute to the persistent gap between research and practice. Guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, this qualitative study explores facilitators and barriers to successful implementation of the intervention. Facilitators, barriers, and latent themes were identified through a combination of inductive content analysis and thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 29 practitioners and leaders across seven municipalities. In the study we identify four key themes: (1) meeting the need, (2) confidence in the intervention, (3) balancing flexibility with complexity, and (4) navigating resource constraints. From a critical realist perspective, these themes were interpreted to suggest mechanisms that either promote or hinder successful implementation of this and comparable complex interventions.