RBI Parent Information

What is the Routine Based Interview (RBI)?

The RBI is an evidenced based assessment tool that helps us understand your child and family needs by talking in detail about your child and family’s day-to-day living.

At Noah’s Ark we use the RBI because research tells us that children learn best from the things they do every day with the people who love and care for them. This is the reason we want to hear about your daily routines and activities.

The RBI helps us develop a list of functional child and family goals. The goals developed from the RBI make sure we focus on your child’s participation in the activities they enjoy and that are important to your family. These goals will be written on your child’s Family Service and Support Plan (FSSP) and we will work on them together.

We came up with a lot of goals. They are definitely goals we will be aiming to achieve.

What happens during the RBI?

The Routines Based Interview will be completed in two hours. Your Key Worker will ask about your family and your day to day living. You only need to tell us what you feel comfortable with. We will ask questions about what you and your family do together and the things you are concerned about. We write these as goals.

At the end of our conversation we will ask you to score these goals using another assessment called the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM). We want to know about performance (how your child going with this right now) and satisfaction (how happy you are with how it is going at the moment). We will use these scores to check that we are making progress in another six months.

Explaining what we mean:

Assessment – a process to work out what’s happening now, what we need to work towards, what the opportunities for learning are and how we know if we are making progress.

Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM) – an assessment tool used to score your goals to help us check that we are making progress. We score two measurements performance and satisfaction.

Child and family function – what you all do together and how that’s working for you.

Everyday learning and therapy – helping children learn new things everyday through doing all the things they love to do and need to do.

Family Service and Support Plan – a list of all your child and family goals written in a way that makes sure we will know if we are making progress.

Participation – when you or your child are really part of something and getting enjoyment and learning out of being involved.

Performance – how you or your child are going with getting this activity or routine done right now

Satisfaction – how happy you are with the way things are going right now

What do other parents say about the RBI?

…I’d never really had a chance to reflect on his day like that. It helped me know what I could ask for help with…..

I felt it went really quick. It didn’t feel like the whole two hours, which was good. I was sort of nervous thinking, Oh, I’m gonna sit and talk for two hours, but really it wasn’t, it was more back and forth, which was good.

I think the end where it was going back through all the points we’d made and then building some goals around those points was a really effective way of goal setting. Yeah, really accurate and a true representation of what is currently going on in our world.