Pai.ACT Programme for Parents of Children With Special Healthcare Needs - Phase I

Pai.ACT: A Deep-Learning Mental Health Advisory System Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Parents of Children With Special Healthcare Needs (Phase I)

This study aims to determine the feasibility, acceptability and potential efficacy of an individual, video-conferencing based Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (FACT) on the mental well-being of parents of children with Special Health Care Needs(SHCN). The study also aims to explore the experience of parents after participating in the individual-based FACT sessions offered by the trained FACT interventionists.

Parents of children with Special Health Care Needs (SHCN) have always been under tremendous pressure to care for their children. They have been experiencing significant caregiving difficulties, such as scheduling and accompanying multiple follow-ups for rehabilitation and functional recovery and managing the child's symptoms and problematic behaviours. With the strike of COVID-19, these parents' stress may even be exacerbated due to the lockdown measures. Children's needs become more demanding with the suspension of the usual care services. Parenting stress has been known to affect parent-child interactions and increase negative parenting behaviours such as harsh, permissive or neglecting parenting impairing the parent's capacity to respond to the demands of the child's illness, which may, in turn, exacerbate the child's health problem and well-being. Recent evidence has advocated the efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on mental health in different population groups, including healthy individuals, parents, children and those with mental health problems. To increase the reach of ACT and overcome the plausible disruptions of mental health services arising from the pandemic, the study proposes to use an innovative intervention approach, that is a brief version of ACT (Focused ACT), delivered by trained FACT interventionists in individual-based, video-conferencing format. The conversation data between the parent and the interventionist will be further analyzed for developing a Deep-Learning Mental Health Advisory System in the second phase of the Pai.ACT project. This study aims to determine the feasibility, acceptability and potential efficacy of an individual, video-conferencing-based Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (FACT) on the mental well-being of parents of children with Special Health Care Needs(SHCN). The study also aims to explore the experience of parents after participating in the individual-based FACT sessions offered by the trained FACT interventionists.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong residents
• living together with the child who is at preschool/school-age (3-9 years old)
• adopt the responsibility of taking care of the child,
• has daily access to their iPhone and Android smartphones.

In addition, potential eligible parents who respond "yes" to any of the five validated screening questions in the Children with Special Health Care Needs (SHCN) Screener (see https://www.childhealthdata.org/docs/cshcn/technical-summary-of-cshcn-screener.pdf) will then be asked the associated follow-up questions to determine whether the child possesses physical, neurodevelopmental/emotional problem(s) that has lasted for at least 12 months. Only children with a positive response(s) to ≥ 1 item in each of the associated follow-up questions will be classified as children with SHCN.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Parents with severe mental illness or developmental disabilities which impaired their ability to comprehend the content of the programme will be excluded.