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Nurse Family Partnership
Nurse Family Partnership
Using Evidence-Based Practices to Impact Mother's and Children's Health and Wellbeing
The Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, The Duke Endowment, and the North Carolina Division of Public Health are leading a statewide partnership of nonprofit and government organizations that has brought the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) to North Carolina. The Trust has committed multi-year grants, totaling more than $2 million to this initiative.
NFP is a national program of preventive care intervention in which nurses visit the homes of low-income women who are pregnant for the first time and continue to visit regularly until the child is two years old. In states where the NFP is being implemented, controlled trials of the NFP model have shown benefits to both mother and child: improved prenatal health; fewer childhood injuries; fewer subsequent pregnancies; increased intervals between births; increased maternal employment; and improved school readiness.
Bringing NFP to North Carolina should promote improvement in the state’s infant mortality rate, which is one of the highest in the nation and is rising. In 2007, the state recorded 8.1 infant deaths per 1,000 live births and during 2008, that number rose to 8.5. The national average is 6.5.
NFP is a good investment not only in the lives of young families but also in reducing the cost of emergency health care and public services required by at-risk families. Independent evaluation of the impact of NFP shows that the return on every dollar invested ranges from $2.88 to $5.70, with the higher return from programs that target higher-risk mothers.
In addition to Guilford County's agency, which was already in existence, this initiative established NFP in nine N.C. counties: Buncombe, Cleveland, McDowell, Mecklenburg, Pitt, Polk, Robeson, Rutherford, and Wake.
The North Carolina Nurse-Family Partnership Sustainability and Expansion Resource Manual, published April 2010, provides an analysis of existing practices and of potential expansion or scale-up sites. Additionally, it includes recommendations for a state NFP administrative infrastructure. The summary of the report is avaliable here.
Contact Allen Smart for additional information.
Nurse-Family Partnership Information
Click for NFP's latest Newslink edition.
Click for the Center for High Impact Philanthropy's press release, in which the Center identified the NFP as "one of two 'high impact opportunities' for donors to assist vulnerable families who cannot afford or access preventive health care services."
To read about the perspectives of members of the Lumbee Nation of North Carolina serving as NFP nurses, see the "Winds of Change" winter 2010 edition.
To read about the latest evidence demonstrating NFP's reduction of the numbers of girls entering the criminal justice system, please see January 2010's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program, a federal program enacted in 2010, will strengthen existing programs like NFP through additional funding for home-visiting components. To read more about the state's initial funding plan click here.
Data released by Prevent Child Abuse North Carolina in April 2010 indicate that North Carolina continues to have significant needs among its youngest families and children.