The Institute of Health Visiting (iHV) has published a toolkit to measure outcomes in health visiting.
It aims to support health visitor leads in developing outcome measures for their local health visiting service.
The toolkit written by Ruth Hodson, professional officer at the iHV, is broken down into six sections to explore both outcomes and evaluaation in health visiting. The guide forms the introduction and background followed by five sections on different aspects of health visiting practice.
'Since the completion of the Department of Health’s Health Visitor implementation plan A Call to Action to transform health visiting services, there has been an increased emphasis on the need to measure the impact and effectiveness of the transformed health visiting services in England,' said Cheryll Adams, executive director of the iHV.
Health visiting services collect data for key performance indicators described in the National Health Visiting Core Service Specification. These indicators mainly focus on the number of core contacts achieved, but does not go into the detail of the health visiting role or the outcomes for families and children.
'Local commissioners are developing their understanding of the health visitor role and how the service contributes to local and national public health outcomes, the local early years strategy and broader social, economic and fiscal outcomes. Health visitors must therefore develop and gather information which is relevant to their practice and which captures the impact of health visiting interventions on health outcomes,' added Ms Adams.
The toolkit has been released this week to mark #HVWeek.