Long-term follow-up for mothers of children with disability after healthy mothers healthy families e-workshops.

There was no comparison group. Everyone got the programme, so the improvements could reflect natural change over time, regression to the mean, other support the mothers were receiving, or simply wanting to report good news on a questionnaire. Only 20 of the 56 mothers who started were still answering questions at the 12-week point, a 36% response rate, so the later results come from a small and possibly unrepresentative group. The researchers did not track how much of the programme each mother actually used, so they cannot say which parts mattered. All the outcomes were self-reported by the mothers themselves. The comparison between mothers with and without a mental health diagnosis had too few people in each group to be reliable, and the authors say a larger study is needed. Twelve weeks is a short follow-up; nothing is known about whether the changes lasted longer. These were mothers who chose to register for a workshop, so they may have been more motivated than mothers who would not seek this out.

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funder named is the Australian Government Department of Social Services. Recruitment and delivery of the workshops were handled by a family organisation, Belongside Families, and the paper states that the facilitator training package was designed and delivered by the first author, who also developed the programme.

Do not read these improvements as proof that the e-workshops caused them. Every mother in the study received the programme, there was no comparison group, and only 20 of the 56 women who started were still completing questionnaires at 12 weeks.