PPP and cervical smear

Primary Care Public Health Nursing Service

Enhanced Roles for Nurses in Maternal and Child Health Centres: Triple P Provider and Cervical Smear Taker                                                                                          By Rany CHOW Senior Nursing Officer, Family Health Service (Hong Kong)

New Roles for Nurses in Maternal and Child Health Centres

For the past 3 to 4 years, the scope of services provided by the maternal and child health centres (MCHCs) have been expanded to cover more psychosocial aspects and the development of specific skills of clients in childcare.  In the process of implementing the related initiatives, MCHC nurses have taken up enhanced roles in conducting developmental surveillance, health screening, health education and other related activities. All these expanded services are quality oriented, demanding nurses to be competent care providers possessing in-depth professional knowledge, rational thinking, critical judgment, problem solving and independent decision making skills.  The enhanced roles of nurses have evolved either from the refinement and advancement of current practice or from completely new tasks.  Among these, two most challenging and well-defined new roles of public health nurses are: (1) as a provider of the group "Positive Parenting Programme" (Triple P) and (2) a Cervical Smear (CS) taker.   The following is a brief introduction to these new initiatives and the roles of the nurse so evolved.

Group Triple P in MCHCs

What is group Triple P?

The programme is developed by the Triple P, Parenting and Family Support Centre, School of Psychology, the University of Queensland. The aim is to enhance parents' self-sufficiency in interacting with their children through 5 levels of family intervention. The group Triple P aims to introduce rigorously  positive parenting skills enabling the parents to handle a diverse range of common parent-child problems.  It is an 8-session programme with 4 group sessions in the form of skills development workshops and 4 individual follow-up telephone consultations/counselling. 

Why group Triple P in MCHCs?

Group Triple P is a form of bahavioural family intervention.  The programme introduces positive child management techniques to parents and helps them identify alternative explanations for their children's behaviours.  Thus, group Triple P is useful in preventing or reducing child behavioural problems.  In response to the health services pledge elaborated by the Health and Welfare Bureau in the 2001 Policy Address, the programme is implemented to reduce child behavioural problems through improving parent-child relationship, enhancing parental skills and child guidance efficacy.  As MCHCs are attended by nearly all parents with children under 6 years of age, the implementation of such programmes will not impose any stigmatizing effect on the parents attending the programmes.  Hence, the MCHCs are ideal places for running group Triple P programmes for parents who have inadequate parenting skills or whose children are having minor behavioural problems.

Who can be the group Triple P provider?

In order to take up the roles of a competent group Triple P provider capable of conducting the workshops and telephone counselling effectively, nurses need to:

l       undertake a 5-day Triple P provider training course offered by the University of Queensland and pass the ascribed accreditation examination;

l       have good facilitation skills to create group dynamics;

l       have sound knowledge in child development; and

l       possess rich experience in taking care families with children under 6 years of age.

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