preview

Nurse Family Partnership (NFP): A Home Study

Decent Essays

Home visiting programs. These are evidence based programs that target the early development of the child by promoting positive parenting and thus prevent child abuse and neglect. There are different types of models such as Healthy Families, Nurse Family Partnership, Parents as Teachers and Early Head Start. They make use of child welfare staff, nurses or trained paraprofessionals using a curriculum that involves two major approaches which may be parent based or child based (Cullen, Ownbey, & Ownbey, 2010). The programs targets at risk parents or families and educate them on positive attitudes and practices that are beneficial to the child, create a healthy environment for children thus promoting their health and development (Cullen et al., …show more content…

This is an evidence based program that target first time low income mothers for children 0 to 2 years; it has been shown that it reduces child maltreatment. It makes use of trained registered nurses to deliver home visits to expectant or new mothers (Browne & Jackson, 2013). The first study on NFP was conducted in Elmira in 1977 and it showed its effectiveness; about 400 women were assigned to a treatment group and control group with a group receiving nurse visits during pregnancy, up to the first 2 years of the child. The results showed that there was evidence to show that mothers that received the nurse visits had various positive outcomes including reduction in the number of reported child abuse and neglect(Besharov, Germanis, Higney, & Call, 2011). Other trials and follow up of the initial trial done also had similar results similar to the initial study which showed its effectiveness in preventing child abuse (Besharov et al., 2011; Eckenrode et al., 2010; Olds, …show more content…

Preventing the initial occurrence has the greatest impact as children’s outcomes are better when the abuse is prevented from occurring in the first instance, however, many children may not be reached before abuse due to a lot of factors e.g. lack of awareness, socio-cultural factors. Therefore, it is important to increase awareness among the population, reach every child at risk and identify ways in which one can address diverse groups in the society. Further research, with improved data collection and analysis is recommended as this will allow a better understanding and improved evaluation of the current strategies in order to know if they are successfully at tackling the issue which can in turn inform better prevention strategies and

Get Access