ANNOUNCEMENTS

Harriet MacMillan named “Researcher of the Year” by the Centre of Excellence for Early Child Development

Not many people receive honours when they do something that fails.  But Richard Tremblay, Director of the Centre of Excellence for Early Child Development (CEECD) in Montreal, knows that failures are just as important as successes in building our knowledge of how children grow and develop.

It’s not surprising, then, that the CEECD chose a paper by the Offord Centre’s own Harriet MacMillan, a child psychiatrist, pediatrician and expert in the study of child maltreatment, as one of the “Top 10” articles on early child development by a Canadian researcher in 2005.  Her study examined the effectiveness of home visitation by public health nurses in preventing the recurrence of child physical abuse and neglect.  It was conducted with McMaster colleagues Helen Thomas, Ellen Jamieson, Christine Walsh, Michael Boyle, Harry Shannon and Amiram Gafni.

For leading this important study, which exposed a well-known “best practice” as being without merit in combating child maltreatment, Dr. MacMillan was named Researcher of the Year for 2005 by the CEECD. 

The founding director of the Child Advocacy and Assessment Program at McMaster Children’s Hospital has spent her entire career thinking about ways to help children who have suffered from abuse.  Decades of research had shown that home visitation by public health nurses can help young mothers take better care of themselves and their babies.  She decided to test home visits by public health nurses with families who had a history of child physical abuse and neglect.

She and her colleagues designed an intensive, two-year program during which public health nurses regularly visited families with a history of abuse.  The visits continued for two years, and included family support, education and links to social services. 

Although mothers loved the visits, their children did not show any positive effects – those families who received the visits were just as likely to have recurrence of abuse or neglect as those who did not participate in the program.  The one positive result was that nurse-visited families who had been involved with the child welfare system for only a short time did show reduction in child physical abuse but not neglect.

The findings raise important questions for both researchers and practitioners.  “If this intensive “best practice” applied to abusing parents had no effect, what are the effects of the untested interventions delivered by thousands of practitioners in the field of child abuse and neglect?” asks Tremblay.  “The urgency of finding answers to these questions becomes even clearer when we consider that interventions have also been shown to cause harm.”

Leon Eisenberg, an internationally renowned psychiatrist and long-time mentor of Dr. MacMillan’s, says researchers must take risks in order to produce the very best science.