Services - Home Visitation & Outreach - Healthy Families
Healthy Families
The Home Visitation program designed to support parents in providing a nurturing, stimulating and safe environment for their children birth to the age of 5. Based on a review of their situation, families with new babies will be offered weekly home visits by trained staff. The program is voluntary, and families can stay involved for a short time, or until the child is 5 years old.
What is a home visitor?
Home visitors have a background in child development and parenting and work with families in their homes. They help new parents with the many questions and challenges of parenthood.
What do home visitors do?
- Visitations to a family's home on a regular basis.
- Connect the family to resources in the community, such as employment, education, medical care (depending on each family's needs).
- Share information on child development and baby care.
- Share information to promote positive parent-child relationships.
- Provide family literacy activities.
- Provides service that is culturally sensitive and completely confidential.
- Provides these services at no cost to the family.
- Helps families identify and address their needs, focusing on building on the families' strengths.
Home visitors
do not provide transportation, child care, and do not give out food, formula or diapers. They can help the family to connect to agencies which support families to meet their basic needs.
How the Process Works
Step 1 - Interview & Referral
Referrals are accepted either prenatally or up to 3 months (or 12 months in special circumstances) after baby's birth.Families can be referred to Healthy Families by their Public Health Nurse, community agencies, family and friends, or by the families themselves.
During the initial interview, the family receives information about Healthy Families, and a checklist will be completed to identify those families who qualify for the program. This interview can be completed in person or over the phone.
With permission from the family, the information gathered in the initial interview will be forwarded to a trained Healthy Families Worker for follow-up.
Step 2 - Review
The Healthy Families Worker then contacts the family to set up the first home visit. Every effort will be made to complete the initial visit within 4 weeks of initial referral to the program.
With the family's participation, the Healthy Families Worker offers to connect all families to resources within their community and offers weekly home visiting services to the families who would benefit most from this support.
Step 3 - Home Visiting
Weekly home visits may begin prenatally or after the birth of the baby. Each visit consists
of three major components:
- parenting
- child development, and
- parent-child interaction
Service is centered around building on families' strengths. Connection to community supports is an integral part of the service. Frequency of home visits decreases over time, based on the family's input and program criteria.
Home Visitors receive ongoing support from a Supervisor through a reflective supervision model. Since Healthy Families is a voluntary program, families can choose to decrease or discontinue service at any time.
Map to FSCA
For more information, please contact FSCA at 403-343-6400.
