A tool for people with family issues
Medical guidelines are created to assist both practitioners and patients. These guidelines offer help in making decisions about appropriate health care. Good guidelines consist of evidence-based recommendations. Based on these recommendations, appropriate treatment can be established. Corresponding to the patient’s needs. What if there was a similar tool for people dealing with family related issues? That’s what we are currently working on.
Evidence based, with recommendations
Presently, HiiL is collaborating with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the Justice Law and Order Sector (JLOS) Uganda to create a Family Justice Catalogue.The Catalogue is specially tailored for Ugandans who deal with family problems. It will mainly contain recommendations which are evidence-based and established according to a methodology widely used for developing medical guidelines. Namely, the PICO and GRADE methods which are developed by healthcare professionals to rate the quality of the best available evidence and to establish health care guidelines. By means of a series of ‘PICO-questions’, certain available interventions are examined for effectiveness. These could be for example treatments. The strength of the evidence is then categorized in different scales and ultimately, a recommendation is made.
The best interventions, identified together
Applying this to the family justice sector, we first identify the most appropriate interventions that will be best suited for the affected individuals. To this end, we have already consulted many users, experts and practitioners alike in Uganda. We also look into international literature, where we further pick out methods of intervention that have proven to work. In the case of divorce, these interventions could be in the form of specific housing-arrangements for children or certain visiting arrangements. After we examine the methods’ effectiveness and we conduct scaling of evidence, similar recommendations can also be made. Making the Catalogue a useful and effective tool for families to help solve their issues!
