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Home Visiting - Demonstrated and Model Programs
Healthy Start (Healthy Families America): Healthy Start is a voluntary, non-medical home visiting program that seeks to insure healthy thriving children and strong, nurturing families by offering both short and long term support and assistance to families with newborn children. Healthy Start service begins during pregnancy or at the time of birth. Through a comprehensive assessment process, families are screened for characteristics that potentially place them at risk for poor child and family outcomes. Families with few, if any risk characteristics are offered short-term services that may include a welcome-home visit, parenting newsletters about child development, and information about community resources and supports.
Longer-term family support services extending through early childhood (up to age five) are offered to families whose multiple characteristics place them at higher risk for poor child and family outcomes. These services include child development information and screening, parent education and support, and linking families to community resources including health care, food, and housing. Healthy Start is based on 12 critical elements. In Oregon, we have added an additional 3 critical components. Healthy Start is currently operating in 40 states nationwide. Each Healthy Start site is provided with the flexibility to tailor the program to the unique needs and characteristics of their community.
Key Contact:
Karen Van Tassell, Healthy Start Coordinator
Oregon Commission on Children and Families
530 Center Street NE, Suite 405
Salem, OR 97310
(503) 378-5120
Nurse Family Partnership Program (David Old´s Nurse Home Visiting): Across the country in 140 sites and 29 states the Nurse Family Partnership Program is being disseminated through training provided by the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. It is a program that has demonstrated in several controlled research sites that this model of Nurse Family Partnership promotes quality of life improvement for clients and also produces substantial societal savings. Not only have there been immediate benefits such as improved prenatal outcomes, decreased child abuse, decreased childhood injuries, decreased subsequent pregnancies, and improved outcomes of subsequent pregnancies, there have also been improvements in the mother´s and child´s life course development over the next 15 years.
Public Health Nurses provide intensive Maternal Case Management and health education services to first-time mothers. A full-time PHN visits a maximum of 25 families, providing home visits on a weekly or biweekly basis from the first trimester of pregnancy until the child´s second birthday. These services are relationship-based, client-focused, client-directed, and strength-based. The nurse must role model a relationship that is clear in its boundaries, respectful, responsive and beneficial. Visits are guided by theories that come from the field of developmental psychology and are based on Human Ecology, Self-Efficacy and Attachment Theory, and protocols that have been developed over more than 22 years of outcome-based research. The Nurse Family Partnership approach is comprehensive and includes the domains of Personal Health, Environmental Health, Life Course Development, Mothering Role, Family and Friends, and Health and Human Services.
Key Contact:
Carol Cole, RN, MPH
Field Services Manager
Multnomah County Health Department
620 NE 2nd
Gresham OR 97080
(503) 988-5158, x 22480
Home Visiting
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