The Darlington Family Assessment Sytem: clinical guidelines for practitioners

The Darlington Family Assessment System (DFAS) consists of a framework of widely accepted concepts, a semi-structured family interview and rating scale, and a detailed account of how to use the system in clinical practice. The model views health issues within a family life-cycle (developmental) framework. It assesses problems at four systemic levels: the child perspective, the parental perspective, the parent-child perspective, and the whole family perspective. The semi-structured interview is designed to see how family members perceive problems and to map out other possible problems, and is a useful basic training tool. Empirical work suggests that the framework of key concepts and the rating scale offer a powerful method for describing and differentiating families. There is evidence that the model is useful as a training method for health professionals undergoing basic training. Detailed clinical guidelines have also been developed, to show how the model can be applied in practice. The advantage of the model is that it can be used with a variety of therapeutic approaches, and to inform choices about which interventions are likely to be successful or not.