CEI worked with the Targeted Earlier Intervention Program (TEI) team within the New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) to develop an evidence infrastructure that enables early intervention providers to access best-available evidence to tailor their services and improve outcomes for children, young people and families. The TEI team developed an evidence portal - a publicly available website that will better enable DCJ-commissioned services to access and use research evidence in their work.
There are significant challenges involved in strengthening the evidence base across what is a diverse early intervention sector in terms of target clients, settings and practice approaches. CEI assisted TEI to adopt a core components approach to ensure that funded programs and services are both evidence-informed (containing core practices that are supported by evidence) and tailored to local needs and contexts (containing flexible activities that can be adapted to client group and setting).
CEI also developed technical specifications to guide the process for reviewing and selecting evidence for the Portal and tested the specifications via an evidence review of child maltreatment prevention interventions.