Health visiting for families facing adversity
This project examines how health visiting services are delivered to and received by families who are facing adversity, including domestic violence, parental mental health problems and substance use.
The project runs from February 2022 to January 2026 and is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), Award ID: NIHR129901.
Background
Many babies and young children are living in households affected by parental alcohol and substance misuse, mental health problems and/or domestic violence. One service that can identify and support these families is Health visiting.
Health visitors are qualified public health nurses who lead a team of professionals to deliver health and developmental reviews to all children under 5 years of age and to give more support to families who need it, including working with other services.
At the moment, we know little about the coverage, intensity, type and costs of health visiting in practice, including for families who are facing adversity, how far and how health visitors support families facing adversity and how this is balanced with providing care to all families in their local area.
In this study we will investigate how local areas deliver health visiting to families facing adversity, looking for patterns in the way they deliver services and how families facing adversity perceive and experience health visiting.
Methodology
This is a mixed methods study which brings together an analysis of administrative data on health visiting services (the community services dataset) with a costing of services delivery and interviews with practitioners and mothers in four case study sites across England.
Impact/dissemination
We will work collaboratively to disseminate our findings to key stakeholders and families.
To date, we have published on how to use the administrative data on health visiting in England, which has known completeness issues and on some of our findings from these same data which show us patterns of health visiting in local areas with complete data.
- Woodman J, Mc Grath-Lone L, Clery A, et al. (2022) Study protocol: a mixed-methods study to evaluate which health visiting models in England are most promising for mitigating the harms of adverse childhood experiences. BMJ Open 2022;12:e066880. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2022-066880
- Liu, M., Woodman, J., Mc Grath-Lone, L., Clery, A., Bunting, C., Bennett, S., Kendall, S., Kirman, J., Weatherly, H., Barlow, J., Bedford, H. and Harron, K. (2024) Local area variation in health visiting contacts across England for children under age 5: a cross-sectional analysis of administrative data in England 2018-2020, International Journal of Population Data Science, 9(2). doi: 10.23889/ijpds.v9i2.2382
- Clery, A., Bunting, C., Liu, M., Harron, K., Woodman, J. and Mc Grath-Lone, L. (2024) Can administrative data be used to research health visiting in England? A completeness assessment of the Community Services Dataset, International Journal of Population Data Science, 9(1)
- Bunting C, Clery A, L McGrath-Lone, Liu M, Kendall S, Bedford H, Cavallaro F, Saloniki E C, Harron K, Woodman J. (2024) How does health visiting in the first year of life vary by family characteristics? A longitudinal analysis of administrative data, Journal of Public Health
Team
Project leads
Project team members
- Dr Samantha Bennett (Consultant in Public Health, Royal Greenwich)
- Professor Jane Barlow (University of Oxford)
- Professor Sally Kendall (University of Kent)
- Ms Jennifer Kirman (Oxford Brookes University)
- Dr Alison Lamont (UCL)
Related links
Contact us
Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU)
Social Research Institute
IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society
University College London
55-59 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0NU
