New Parent Home Visiting Model Could Reduce Need For Medical Services During Children’s First Year

A new parent home visiting program model that uses a nurse-parent educator team may be able to reduce children’s health care use to normal preventive care during the first year of life. Children whose parents received the home visiting services were one-third less likely to visit the emergency department. They were also 41% less likely to have visited a primary care professional. The program reduced infant health care use for high-risk and lower-risk families.

These findings were reported in “Home Visiting and Use of Infant Health Care: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” by M. Rebecca Kilburn . . .