Discussion
chronically ill
CHRONICALLY ILL
The presentation and analysis of general and/or specific mechanisms of action of a regionally networked organization that operates across sectors, costs and service providers with regard to their effectiveness for families with children in need of care is new. As far as can be seen, only the case management in the German PariSozial project [The strength of this study is that it, besides the usual variables of ‘prescribed’ care, looks at the health and resilience of all family members involved by examining how a FGP can influence the entire family system with regard to increasing quality of life, resilience and self-efficacy. The network structures of FGP also open up better to previously unknown regional supply offers (incl. youth welfare office, school, social pediatric centers etc.). In addition, the comprehensive information collected in this study will also enable us to answer other research questions regarding families with children in need of care, such as relationships between individual needs and existing range of services. Therefore, a structured assessment (family-reported needs) is to be developed as well as a handbook (transfer model) with recommendations for the implementation of sustainable processes and structures for the needs of families with children in need of care. Eventually, these results will be applied in the standard care to strengthen and relieve families with disabled or chronically ill children.There are, however, a number of limitations. A possible limitation of this study is that we only use self-reported outcomes for the impact analysis of FGPs as our primary research goal. Outcomes reported by someone else (e.g. clinical data) are not planned. However, for the most part we use psychometrically tested instruments developed for different contexts and languages (incl. German). Compared to other studies using the measurements, we expect a slightly higher proportion of missing values in some items after 18 months, but tackling this issue with imputation techniques is feasible. Missing values in psychometric testing are not a problem per se, but may result in biased reliability scores [