 Program Announcements |
January 2000-Formal Evaluation of Hawaii's Healthy Start Program Documents
How An Original Demonstration Program Model Fares When Expanded or Taken
to Scale
Home visiting today enjoys widespread endorsement as a way to promote child health and development and prevent child abuse and neglect. Many home visiting models have been developed. Some use nurses, baccalaureate- or graduate-school trained, as the deliverers of service; others use para-professionals with varying degrees of training and professional supervision. The supplement to the January 2000 issue of the journal Pediatrics (Vol. 105, No.1, pp250-259) has an article that reports on the findings of a process- and experimental design-based evaluation of Hawaii's Healthy Start Program (HSP) that was jointly funded by HRSA/MCHB, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Hawaii Department of Health . The model underlying the Hawaii Healthy Start Program was piloted in a single community in Hawaii during 1985-1988 and has since expanded to cover about two-thirds of the state. The Pediatrics January 2000 article reports on the findings of the paraprofessional home visiting component of the program. It seeks to describe how closely the implemented home visiting component of the program mirrored the specifications of the original demonstration model. Evaluation study results are a mixed bag of positives and negatives. Overall, results indicate that actual service delivery departed in many ways from the demonstration model tested several years ago. Community agencies, for example, implemented the same model differently, even when following the same contracts for service provisions. Screening coverage, was more complete when performed by program, rather than hospital, staff. In person assessment greatly increased a family's willingness to enroll in home visiting. The investigators conclude by accentuating the underlying complexities inherent in taking a program from the demonstration phase to system wide implementation. They exhort states and communities establishing home visiting programs to include a technically strong and concurrent evaluation component as part of the overall implementation of such programs. A technically strong and concurrent evaluation component, they suggest, ensures that programs reach and engage the families most likely to benefit.
|
For more information about the MCH Research Program, contact Kishena Wadhwani, c/o Maternal and Child Health Bureau, 5600 Fishers Lane, Parklawn Building Room 18A-55, Rockville, Maryland 20857; phone: (301) 4443-2927; e-mail: kwadhwan@hrsa.gov. |
||
|
