Tag Archives: Home Visiting Program

Home Visitor Webinar Series: Socializations in Home-Based Programs

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Tuesday, April 10, 2018
3–4 p.m. ET

Register Online Now!

Learn about the key role socializations play in home-based programs during this webinar. Monthly socializations offer both children and parents a chance to participate in group activities and interact with peers. Parents have many time demands so it can be challenging for them to participate. Join us to explore practices, activities, and strategies for offering engaging and effective socializations.

Topics for the webinar include:

  • The role of socializations in Head Start and Early Head Start home-based programs
  • Planning and implementing effective socializations
  • Frequently asked questions about socializations
  • Resources to support informative and engaging socializations

Target Audience

  • Home visiting program leaders
  • Home visitors
  • Regional T/TA staff who support home visiting programs

How to Register

Select the link to register: https://events-na2.adobeconnect.com/content/connect/c1/951782966/en/events
/event/shared/1043467858/event_registration.html?sco-id=1099394061&_charset_=utf-8

Questions?

To learn more, contact the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching, and Learning at ecdtl@ecetta.info or (toll-free) 1-844-261-3752.

Home Visitor Webinar Series 2018 Calendar

Save the dates and mark your calendars! The Home Visitor Series webinars occur bi-monthly, from 3–4 p.m. ET:

  • Tuesday, June 12, 2018
  • Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2018

To watch previous webinars in this series on-demand, visit https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/home-visitor-series.

Using Data to Measure Performance of Home Visiting

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10/12/2015

Across the country, state legislatures are turning to evidence-based policymaking to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently and effectively. One example is family support and coaching. In response to research confirming that the early years of childhood affect learning, behavior, and health for a lifetime, many states have invested in these programs, commonly referred to as “home visiting.” Evidence shows that families that participate in home visiting programs, which focus on strengthening vulnerable families with children under age 5, are often more self-sufficient and better able to handle the challenge of parenting and to raise healthier, safer children.

However, for many reasons, including differences in family needs, culture, and the availability of supportive community services, past evidence of effectiveness alone does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes. Evidence must play an essential role throughout the life of the program, from legislation and planning to design and implementation. Ongoing performance monitoring is vital to understanding whether desired family and child outcomes are being realized. Several states have passed legislation to make home visiting programs more effective and accountable by requiring the agencies that oversee them to set goals and measure results.

Source: The PEW Charitable Trusts

Available at: http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2015/10/using-data-to-measure-performance-of-home-visiting

Promising Practices for “Learn the Signs. Act Early.” 

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10/8/2015

What works in helping communities to learn the signs and act early?

This is a collection of locally inspired models and ideas that have been implemented and evaluated to varying degrees in programs and communities.

A promising practice helps spread the reach of the campaign and has the potential to positively impact families with young children and the organizations, health care professionals, and early care and education providers who serve them.

Many of the activities in this collection represent the work of Act Early Ambassadors and State Systems grantees who found creative solutions for implementing Learn the Signs. Act Early. with greatest potential impact using very modest resources. We hope their work will inspire you to think about how you can adopt and adapt activities in your local programs and communities to promote awareness of the importance of tracking developmental milestones and acting early on concerns.

How were Promising Practices identified?

The collection includes activities from the beginning of the campaign (2005) through 2014. We established criteria to assess each activity and determine which to include in the collection. Criteria were informed by program values that broadly define what we consider to be a successful and promising activity. Each year we will review partner activities and apply the criteria to them so we can continue to update and add promising activities to the collection.

What about activities not captured here?

Some activities contain more detail than others, and some activities may have been excluded because we did not have sufficient information to score them. In the years to come, we plan to:

  • Improve our ability to gather as much information as we can about our partners’ important work to promote and integrate Learn the Signs. Act Early. within programs and communities across the country,
  • Expand evaluation studies of promising activities, and
  • Use this collection to raise awareness among partners about their role in sharing their important work with us and collecting process and outcome data to demonstrate impact.

If you have questions or suggestions about the collection or any of the specific activities, please contact ActEarly@cdc.gov and include “Promising Practices” in the subject line.

Source:  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Available at: http://blogs.cdc.gov/actearlypromisingpractices/

Home Visiting: The Expansion of an Idea 

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8/2015

Investing in home-based services for pregnant women and new parents is a topic of high interest. Of the myriad ways to reach out to young children and their parents, home visiting has surfaced as a uniquely promising approach for promoting the early intervention mission.

These features include:

Reaching new parents in a nonstigmatizing manner: Outside of public education, prenatal and obstetric care are among the most broadly accessed services in the United States. Offering home visiting within a health care framework engages new parents without requiring them to be singled out as facing unique difficulties. Similarly, all parents share a common interest in preparing their children for later learning and insuring they are well positioned to nurture their child’s healthy development and early learning.

Minimizing barriers to accessing service: Accessing any intervention can be daunting, particularly for parents lacking experience and skills in navigating complex service delivery systems. Home visiting helps parents overcome barriers to service access and connects families with appropriate supports in a timely manner.

Individualizing the message: Home visiting providers tailor their messages to fit a parent’s specific knowledge, skills, cultural beliefs, and learning style. Personalizing services is particularly important given the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of a state’s new parent population.

Opportunities to evaluate the home environment and engage other caregivers: Delivering services within a participant’s home offers a unique opportunity to determine the physical safety of a child’s most proximate environment. Repeated home visits allow for a more nuanced assessment of the home’s general stability, relationships among family members, and availability of informal and formal supports.

Since the early 1970s, home visiting programs have proliferated in the United States. They have been promoted as a strategy to engage parents in their young child’s early learning, to insure a new mother and her infant have access to a high-quality medical home, and to address parental and contextual challenges that place a young child at risk for child maltreatment or poor developmental outcomes. Changes to federal policy in 1989 allowed states to use Medicaid dollars to support early home visiting. Over the past 40 years, several states, such as Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Rhode Island, Vermont, and West Virginia, have used these funds, and state-generated resources, to expand home visiting programs they found promising or establish at least one new parent initiative to support a parent concerned about how she might best care for her children. Federal investments in home visiting also were available through the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). In the 2003 CAPTA reauthorization, voluntary home visiting was identified as one of the core Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention (CBCAP) program services included in Title II of the Act.

In 2010, Congress passed the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV) as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The bill provided for a $1.5 billion public investment to assist states, territories, and tribal entities in replicating evidence-based, targeted home visiting programs and building a comprehensive early childhood system to promote the health and safety of pregnant women, children ages 0–8, and their families. This legislation, while dramatically increasing home visiting services across the country, benefited from the early replication work achieved by states, often working in partnership with one or more national home visiting models.

This video provides a visual of how home visiting has spread throughout the country as seen through the lens of five evidence-based home visiting models. These five include four of the oldest and most widely available models in the country (Healthy Families America, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters – HIPPY, Nurse Family Partnership, and Parents as Teachers) as well as one of the newer models gaining increased attention (SafeCare). The video does not represent all investments—either state or federal—in home visiting at any point in time. Rather, it illustrates the date at which each model’s current affiliate agencies began enrolling families. Collectively, the video illustrates how these five models have expanded over the years and how communities increasingly gained access to a greater array of home visiting options.The continued expansion of home visiting and the ability to provide families with access to an array of strategies is essential if the approach is to achieve its goal of providing all parents the capacity they need to insure their child’s healthy development and safety.

Source: Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago

Available at: https://vimeo.com/134656037

OpenDoors – The Home-Based Option

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4/2015

This handbook discusses the effectiveness of home visiting as a service delivery method, outlines the necessary relationship building process with families, and offers home visitors an understanding of the comprehensive services they offer to families. It details how home visitors can get support, and includes frequently asked questions about the home-based program option.

Source: Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center, Early Head Start National Resource Center

Available at: https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/ods/resource/home-visitors-handbook/detail/

Services for Families of Infants and Toddlers Experiencing Trauma: A Research-to-Practice Brief 

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3/27/2015

Research documents the high rate of exposure to trauma among infants and toddlers, particularly children living in high-poverty communities.  Beginning life in the context of trauma places infants and toddlers on a compromised developmental path.  This brief summarizes what is known about the impact of trauma on infants and toddlers, and the intervention strategies that could potentially protect them from the adverse consequences of traumatic experiences. Interventions that are highlighted support parents to provide the stable and nurturing caregiving that is responsive to the child’s general developmental needs and that promotes children’s sense of safety and security. Such interventions may reduce or provide a buffer against infants’ traumatic experiences. Finally, the brief discusses how child care, Early Head Start, home visitation, and child welfare can become trauma-informed infant/toddler service delivery systems. This brief was written by Brenda Jones Harden, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland. Dr. Harden is a member of the Network of Infant/Toddler Researchers, a consortium of leading researchers studying the first three years of life.

Source: Office of Planning, Research & Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families

Available at: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/resource/impact-of-trauma-families-of-infants-and-toddlers

Birth to Three Archive 2014

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3/2015

The 18th Annual Birth to Three Institute (BTT) was a three-day event designed to enhance the quality of services for expectant parents, infants, toddlers, and families. Explore the plenary sessions and webinars below by topic. They may be helpful to: Early Head Start (EHS), Migrant and Seasonal Head Start, American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start, child care, and family child care staff; training and technical assistance providers; and the broader early childhood community.

Source: Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center, Early Head Start National Resource Center

Available at: http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/tta-system/ehsnrc/btt/archive_2014.html

Designing a Home Visiting Framework for Families in Public and Mixed-Income Communities

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October 30, 2014

Though young children in public and mixed-income housing are exposed to some of the deepest poverty and developmental and educational risks in the United States, they are usually out of reach of many interventions that might help. Home visiting programs hold promise for helping vulnerable families, but most are not designed to fully address the needs of public and mixed-income housing residents. This brief describes important issues that program planners and early childhood leaders should consider when designing appropriate and responsive home visiting programs that reach young children in these communities.

Source: Urban Institute

Available at: http://www.urban.org/publications/413281.html

Maternal and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE) Check-In project–Update contact information, consent forms, child and family outcomes survey

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8/20/2014

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), in partnership with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), both of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is proposing a data collection activity as part of the Maternal and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE) Check-In project. The purpose of the MIHOPE Check-In project is to maintain up-to-date contact information for families that participated in MIHOPE the national evaluation of the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, so it is possible to conduct future follow-up studies and assess the potential long-term impact of the program. In addition to contact information, the MIHOPE Check-In project will also maintain up-to-date consent forms for the collection of administrative data and administer a brief survey on child and family outcomes.

Source: Federal Register, Volume 79 Issue 161

Available at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2014-08-20/html/2014-19717.htm

Moving Beyond Depression, An Effective Program to Treat Maternal Depression in Home Visiting: Opportunities for States

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7/2014

Depression is prevalent among new mothers, par- ticularly among low-income women. High rates of maternal depression (including prenatal and postpar- tum conditions) have been found among the popula- tions served by home visiting programs. For example studies suggest that half of low-income women in home visiting, Early Head Start, and other public programs report depressive symptoms. For women living in poverty and women of color, depression often goes untreated.

While depression is prevalent among mothers in home visiting programs, these programs alone are insufficient to bring about substantial improvement in depression for individuals and populations served. Furthermore, studies show that depression can lessen or constrain the potential positive effects of home visiting services.

This brief highlights the Moving Beyond DepressionTM program and its effective, new approach to treating maternal depression. Using In-Home Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (IH-CBT), Moving Beyond Depression offers treatment for depressed mothers, provided alongside a home visiting pro- gram. The approach seeks to: a) optimize engage- ment and impact through delivery of treatment in the home setting; b) focus on issues important to young, low-income mothers; and c) build a strong collaborative relationship between therapists and home visitors to enhance the effectiveness of both approaches.

Recent research on Moving Beyond Depression demonstrates the potential for using IH-CBT to augment what evidence-based home visiting models offer families and significantly improve outcomes. States have opportunities to add this evidence- based, maternal depression treatment program to their home visiting programs and systems. Using MIECHV, Medicaid, health reform and other policy options, states can add evidence-based treatment ca- pacity to reduce, not just screen for, maternal depres- sion among high risk new mothers.

Source: Every Child Succeeds

Available at: http://www.movingbeyonddepression.org/sites/all/themes/moving/pdf/mbdwhitepaper.pdf