Health-led parenting support

Twenty new test sites for The Family Nurse Partnership Programme
On 17 March 2008, ministers announced 20 new test sites as follows: Sunderland, Cumbria, Liverpool, Blackpool, Leeds, Hull, Nottingham, Calderdale, Stockport, South Birmingham, Coventry, North East Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Islington, Lambeth, Hastings and Rother, Milton Keynes, Plymouth, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, and Southampton. For further details, read the press release.

Family Nurse Partnership - Bidding Guide 2008-09
This document contains full details of the programme and the application process for the second wave of recruitment. 

The Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) Programme 

In Reaching Out: An Action Plan on Social Exclusion (Sept  2006) the Government announced a proposal to establish 10 projects to test the Nurse-Family Partnership model of intensive home visiting for vulnerable first-time young mothers. The Prime Minister announced in autumn 2007 that Because no child should ever be written off, for mothers of infants, we will expand the help of nurse-family partnerships.  A total of £30m has been allocated to support this over the Spending Review period, from 2008-09 to 2010-11. 

In England the intervention is called the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) and the Government has been running it as a pilot in 10 areas since March 2007. The pilot phase is being evaluated and the learning will be used to support effective implementation in this second wave of sites. Early findings look promising with high levels of enrolment, engagement of fathers, enthusiasm of the nurses and overall the successful replication of the FNP programme in England.

The Programme

Developed over 25 years in the US, the FNP has three primary aims to improve pregnancy outcomes; to improve child health and development, and to improve parents' economic self-sufficiency.

The FNP is an intensive, preventive, home-visiting programme delivered by specially trained nurses and midwives who have experience of working with families in the community. It is a structured programme offered to at risk, first-time young parents from early pregnancy until the child is 2 years old. Pregnancy and birth are key points when most families are highly receptive to support and extra help.

Each site has a supervisor and a team of up to 6 Family Nurses. Each nurse is expected to recruit a caseload of approximately 25 mothers. Practitioners delivering the programme have additional skills and knowledge in areas such as building a therapeutic relationship, motivational interviewing, attachment, behaviour change and using the guidelines and materials.

Benefits

The Nurse-Family Partnership is an evidenced-based, nurse home-visiting programme that improves the health, well-being and self-sufficiency of low-income, young, first-time parents and their children. In the US, three large-scale randomised control research trials have been carried out. These have shown significant and consistent benefits; improving the health and well-being of both children and their families.

The outcomes include:

• Improvements in women's prenatal health
• Reductions in children's injuries
• Fewer subsequent pregnancies
• Greater intervals between births
• Increases in fathers' involvement
• Increases in employment
• Reductions in welfare and food stamps
• Improvements in school readiness
• Cost savings over childhood of $5 dollars for every $1 invested

Experience from the US shows that maximum return on investment depends on:

• Highly educated registered nurses and midwives delivering home visits to low-income mothers who are pregnant for the first time
• The programme being implemented with fidelity to the intervention-model tested in the randomised trials
• Services being delivered at sufficient scale to benefit from basic, operational efficiencies (each site serving at least 100 families by the end of year one).

For information and details regarding the application process for the recruitment of the second wave of sites, read the Family Nurse Partnership - Bidding Guide 2008-09 document available at the top of this page.