Home Visiting Interventions for Maternal and Child Health
Summary
Home visiting interventions involve scheduled in-home support provided by trained health professionals or paraprofessionals during the antenatal and postnatal periods. These programmes aim to bolster maternal wellbeing, promote positive parenting practices, and optimise early childhood development by offering health assessments, developmental screening, parent education, psychosocial support and connections to community resources. Evidence shows that initiating visits prenatally and maintaining contact through the first two years of life can improve birth outcomes, enhance parent–child attachment, reduce rates of child maltreatment and foster cognitive and socioemotional skills. Critical success factors include cultural responsiveness, adherence to evidence-based protocols, flexible delivery models and collaboration across health and social service sectors. By addressing social determinants of health—such as access to care, family support and maternal mental health—home visiting interventions contribute to narrowing health inequities and establishing a foundation for lifelong maternal and child wellbeing worldwide.
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Home Visiting Interventions for Maternal and Child Health publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in home visiting interventions for maternal and child health across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Home visiting intervention: A structured service delivery model in which staff provide health, developmental and social support directly in families’ homes.
Antenatal: The period during pregnancy before the birth of a child.
Postnatal: The period immediately following childbirth, often encompassing the first two years of a child’s life.
Paraprofessional: A worker trained to perform specific health or social care tasks under supervision, without full professional licensure.
Proportionate universalism: A strategy that offers universal services with an intensity scaled to levels of need to reduce health inequalities.
References
- Development of a culturally enhanced caregiver-facilitated language nutrition intervention “+Language is Medicine” to address developmental delay in Diné (Navajo) toddlers. Frontiers in Public Health (2024).
- Effect of a Community Agency–Administered Nurse Home Visitation Program on Program Use and Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes. JAMA Network Open (2019).
- Effectiveness of home visiting programs on child outcomes: a systematic review. BMC Public Health (2013).
- A better start for health equity? Qualitative content analysis of implementation of extended postnatal home visiting in a disadvantaged area in Sweden. International Journal for Equity in Health (2018).
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