Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Feb 16, 2025
Date Accepted: Aug 26, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Child and Family eHub - A Novel Digital Solution to Improve the Mental Health of Australian Children: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Evaluation of Feasibility and Acceptability.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Child mental health disorders are a significant Australian public health issue with high prevalence rates compounded by inequitably higher rates for those living in families with lower income, lower levels of parental education and higher levels of unemployment. Prevention and early intervention approaches are critical to address problems early. When caregivers seek information and services to support their child’s mental health needs they commonly use many untested online search strategies. To address this, we developed a digital Child and Family eHub prototype (eHub) through a user-centred design process involving families experiencing adversity and local service providers. The eHub provides online navigation and evidence-based information for families and aims to increase equitable access to and use of: i) information and ii) the existing primary health, mental health, and social services system to improve mental health outcomes for caregivers with children 0-12 years.
Objective:
This protocol outlines how we will evaluate the eHub.
Methods:
Using a prospective cohort sample of 270 participants from three Australian states, we will undertake a mixed methods Type 3 implementation impact evaluation that tests an implementation strategy while observing and gathering information on the intervention’s impact on relevant outcomes. In this protocol implementation will be assessed as a primary outcome using Proctor’s outcomes for implementation framework and secondary outcomes will include caregiver access and use of the eHub and associated child and parent mental health outcomes. Baseline, ongoing eHub user analytic data and 6 month quantitative and qualitative data will be collected in parallel and integrated during data analysis and interpretation.
Results:
Participant enrolment for the study will begin in February 2024 with participants involved in the eHub evaluation for 6 months.
Conclusions:
The results of this study will be instrumental in refining the intervention for future scaling to other Australian sites. Clinical Trial: ISRCTN49839991
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.