Indicator: 57 - Newborns Receiving Home Visits

Why This Is Important

It is widely recognized that prenatal and post-natal care are vitally important in promoting the early development of children. Families who arrange for their newborns to receive home visits by professional caregivers are actively helping to create a healthy life for themselves and their child. Home visiting programs strengthen families and reduce the risk factors that contribute to child abuse and neglect. Participating in such programs augments parenting skills, helps to correct unreasonable parental expectations of children, helps to remedy parental isolation, and boosts parental resources.
 

Where We Stand

Maine has a number of home visiting programs at the state and local level. There is currently no single, reliable statewide count of all the newborns or families that receive a home visit. However, data does exist for three of the major home visiting programs: Healthy Families, Parents As Teachers, and Parents Are Teachers, Too. These programs, provided by 16 nonprofit organizations under State contract, offer home visits, group activities such as playgroups and “Boot Camp for Dads,” and materials on age-appropriate child growth and development.

These 16 programs helped to strengthen 2,263 families in fiscal year 2002. This doubled the number of families served the previous year (988), which was a start-up year for many of the providers. Of agencies reporting time of enrollment, 26% of the families served were enrolled in the prenatal period. This is an increase over prior years and is important because it enabled early identification of risk factors that might affect those children and expanded opportunities to reduce those factors during the pregnancy.

The programs also reported helping families to reduce substance abuse; about 70% of the families who reported use of tobacco, alcohol or other substances said that, as a result of the program, they ceased that use or changed their behavior so that the child was no longer exposed to the parents’ substance use.
 

Data Sources and Context

Data for the above home visiting programs comes from the Bureau of Health, Division of Family Health, Healthy Families Program. More complete data for these programs is being developed as part of a five-year evaluation of these programs being conducted by Hornby-Zeller Associates, Inc.