Expanding a Nurse Visitation Program to New Ohio Counties

Since 2006, Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Nurse-Family Partnership has sent specially trained nurses to visit mostly young, mostly first-time expectant parents in their homes. The nurses help teach the parents about parenting, then continue with home visits up to the child’s second birthday.

Because these young parents often have limited resources, the nurses become trusted confidants and can make life-changing differences for mothers and children. Years of evidence show that there are benefits to maternal health, school readiness for children and other measures of well-being.

Now, through The Center For Family Safety and Healing at Nationwide Children’s and its partners, the Nurse-Family Partnership is expanding to four additional counties in southeastern Ohio: Athens, Guernsey, Morgan and Muskingum.

“Gov. Mike DeWine has made maternal home visitation services a real priority in his administration, and the Ohio Department of Health came to us about using the infrastructure we have to bring the Nurse-Family Partnership to more areas,” said Jeanne Wickliffe, Home Visitation Program manager at The Center For Family Safety and Healing. “We know how important this program has already been to hundreds of young mothers in the Columbus area, so we are excited that we have the chance to do this.”

The Nurse-Family Partnership is a national model that began in 1996, often in collaboration with local and county health departments. Nationwide Children’s administers the Columbus-area program with funding from Help Me Grow, the Ohio Department of Health’s parent support program and Maternal Infant Early Child Home Visiting Grant, a federal grant dispersed to programs in Ohio by the Ohio Department of Health. At full capacity, Nationwide Children’s Columbus-area program serves 200 families at a time.

As part of the expansion to four new counties, The Center For Family Safety and Healing knew it would be crucial to employ nurses who lived in the areas they were going to serve, said Wickliffe. Those nurses have a more precise understanding of the challenges and risks that families face in their communities.

A collaboration with OhioHealth O’Bleness Hospital is making that possible in Athens County. Other nurses have been hired for Muskingum, Morgan and Guernsey counties and are already serving there. The full expansion will help approximately 125 families across the four counties, Wickliffe said.

“We’re already seeing the positive effects of working with mothers and families in these four counties,” said Wickliffe. “We are now doing more to build trust with community organizations, so they’ll feel comfortable referring families to us, and so we can do even more good in those counties.”