Parental Relationships Part 2: Practical Methods of Assessment and Support for Medical Doctors

This session is designed to help you recognise and respond appropriately to relationship stress between parents. It provides you with some simple tools that will help you to explore with parents their understanding of what is happening in their relationship, and to look at what they might be able to do to strengthen their relationship with one another.

Learning objectives

By the end of this session you will be able to:

• Identify when parental relationship distress is significantly affecting child health and wellbeing
• Develop practical support for families experiencing parental conflict
• Employ the Brief Encounters approach

This presents an opportunity for the practitioner to make an early intervention by engaging with the parent and encouraging them to seek their own solutions. Where underlying relationship and family issues can be identified by practitioners early in routine practice, there is less likelihood of problems escalating.