SCH Home

Health visiting

The Health Visiting Service

The Health Visiting Service provides a home visiting and community based service to support children and families in promoting health and wellbeing. The service works predominately with families with children under 5 years.

Health Visiting teams also work with other professionals and organisations such as GP’s, Midwives, Social Workers, Children Centres, Speech and Language Therapist as well as Voluntary Agencies such as Action for Children.

The Health Visitor

A Health Visitor is a nurse with a specialist public health qualification who manages teams of community nurses and nursery nurses. The health visiting teams are usually based in GP surgeries but more recently can be located in Children Centres.

Family Health

Health Visitors are not just interested in the health of your child but are also there to listen to you, to help advise and support you and your family in many situations. Examples may include how to get help with housing, employment and leisure activities as well as more specific matters related to your children and your own physical and emotional health.

Health Visiting Team

Health visiting teams provide information on a range of issues:

Healthy eating including breastfeeding and weaning support
Child health promotion, including child health reviews
Accident prevention including reducing the risk of cot death
Emotional health and well-being support including antenatal and post natal depression support and intervention
Childhood immunisations
Parenting support to understand your child’s needs and development
Smoking cessation advice
Accessing specialist self-help groups
Domestic abuse and Safeguarding children

Priorities of Service

Health Visiting focuses on early intervention, prevention and the promotion of health for young children and families.

Priorities include:

supporting and guiding mothers and fathers in pregnancy and in their parenting role with a particular focus on young parents.
increasing the levels of breast feeding
child health and development
improving the emotional health and wellbeing of children and families
improve the experience of parents with children with additional needs
reducing the rate of obesity among children
reducing inequalities in health
tackling key public health priorities (in particular obesity, smoking, alcohol, drugs and accident prevention);
reducing conceptions in under 18 year olds ( DH 2007)
safeguarding children,
addressing domestic violence

These priorities lie at the heart of a universal (offered to all families) Child Health Promotion Programme (2008), now called “Healthy Child” and the work of Children’s Centres.

As part of the Healthy Child Programme the universal core contacts from the health visiting team are:

Antenatal visit
New birth visit within 10 – 16 days of birth to include a New born hearing screen
6 – 12 week review to include discussion with mother regarding maternal emotional health and wellbeing
Review of health and development before one year
Review of health and development at two and half years including looking at speech and language
Review of health and development at 3 years plus contact – this can be completed by early years practitioners in a playgroup or other setting

In addition to the above the health visiting team will provide additional contacts and intervention to those families who require further support as identified in the family health needs assessment which is carried out by the health visitor. All support and intervention is in partnership with the parent(s)

Stronger links with early years (nurseries and playgroups) and public health workers are essential to the success of the programme, particularly working in collaboration with Local Authority Children Centres. Increasingly Children’s Centres will be the focus of integrated services for children – a one stop shop of which health will play a key role.