- | Guide
The Home Visiting Supervisor’s Online Handbook is designed to help Supervisors become familiar with the unique and comprehensive approach of the Head Start home-based program option. (author summary)
- | Guide
This handbook provides detailed guidance, tools and strategies, and references realated to reflective supervision for West Virginia Supervisors.
- | Brief
As a part of the Region X Innovation grant, this study seeks to identify the current strengths, gaps, and unmet needs in the home visitor workforce in Region X. In particular, it has been designed to help inform workforce recruitment, retention, and professional development needs to help ensure the well-being and effectiveness of home visitors in the region. (author summary)
- | Report
This report presents the first findings from the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE), the legislatively mandated national evaluation of MIECHV. (author summary)
- | Article
Background – The Florida Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program delivers evidence-based home visiting services to over 1400 families each year. Home visitors are integral in providing resources for families to promote healthy pregnancy, child development, family wellness, and self-sufficiency. Due to the nature of this work, home visitors experience work-related pressures and stressors that can impact staff well-being and retention. Objectives – The purpose of this study was to understand primary sources of work-related stress experienced by home visitors, subsequent effects on their engagement with program participants, and to learn of coping mechanisms used to manage stress. Methods – In 2015, Florida MIECHV program evaluators conducted ten focus groups with 49 home visitors during which they ranked and discussed their top sources of work-related stress. Qualitative analysis was conducted to identify emergent themes in work-related stressors and coping/supports. Results – Across all sites, the burden of paperwork and data entry were the highest ranked work-related stressors perceived as interfering with home visitors’ engagement with participants. The second-highest ranked stressors included caseload management, followed by a lack of resources for families, and dangerous environments. Home visitors reported gratification in their helping relationships families, and relied on coworkers or supervisors as primary sources of workplace support along with self-care (e.g. mini-vacations, recreation, and counseling). Conclusions for practice – Florida MIECHV home visitors across all ten focus groups shared similar work-related stressors that they felt diminished engagement with program participants and could impact participant and staff retention. In response, Florida MIECHV increased resources to support home visitor compensation and reduce caseloads, and obtained a competitive award from HRSA to implement a mindfulness-based stress reduction training statewide. (author abstract)
- | Article
The current, unprecedented scaling up of evidence-based home visiting makes it crucial to elucidate the factors and processes that promote successful program implementation. One key factor is the well-being of the workforce. Scant attention has been paid to the ways in which early childhood home visitors may be affected by their work with low-income, high-risk families, however. This mixed methods study examined Early Head Start(EHS) home visitors’ compassion satisfaction, secondary traumatic stress, burnout, and job withdrawal, and their associations with home visitor, family, and work characteristics. Data included survey questionnaires (N = 77) and individual interviews (n = 7). A subset of home visitor survey data (n = 27) was linked with data from EHS families (N = 102) to examine the associations between home visitors’ well-being and EHS families’ psychosocial risks. Overall, EHS home visitors demonstrated moderate to high compassion satisfaction and more variable levels of secondary traumatic stress. The home visitors’ occupational stress and well-being were associated with home visitor, family, and work characteristics. For example, home visitors’ secondary traumatic stress was associated with EHS families’ psychosocial risks. Home visitors’ burnout was associated with job withdrawal. Both quantitative and qualitative data showed that home visitors were exposed to varying levels of EHS family risk and trauma, and that some home visitors were deeply affected by this exposure. (author abstract)
- | Planning Tool
Adapting a framework from SAMHSA and the Annapolis Coalition for Behavioral Health Workforce Development, the Children and Youth Committee has focused a set of recommendations to enhance the mental health (and co-occurring) workforce serving children families in Wisconsin. These recommendations are intended to guide policy decisions and advocacy for workforce development. They are aligned with best practice approaches of other state and federal initiatives, and promising initiatives within the state of Wisconsin. (author summary)
- | Brief
Many home visiting programs lack the tools and knowledge to boost staff well-being, including an overarching definition and framework to guide their path.The Supporting and Strengthening the Home Visiting Workforce project seeks to understand professional well-being in the home visiting context: how it should be defined, measured, and bolstered to improve program and family outcomes. This brief offers concrete ways for home visiting programs, models, and local agencies to measure and strengthen professional well-being. It focuses on five key drivers theorized to influence home visitor job satisfaction, psychological well-being, job meaning and fulfillment, and self-efficacy and confidence. It builds on findings from a research report and conceptual model previously released by OPRE. (author summary)
- | Blog
An invitation to join a home visiting summit session called “Vocation-Vision-Voice: Strategies in Professional Development” that explores how supervisory leadership invested the professional development of staff promotes long term program engagement from staff and families. Using a case study of an Early Head Start Home-based program in Santa Clara, California serving a Latino community with fully bilingual staff, we’ll explore how supervisory leadership invested in ongoing professional development of staff promotes long term program engagement for both staff and families. (author summary)
- | Article
Home visitation programs are recognized as a preferred model for delivering services to children, parents, and families identified as at-risk. This study compares newly hired home visitors’ (N = 82) perceptions of their job readiness, initial training, supervision and support, commitment to the intervention model, and job satisfaction from ten sites: Nurse–Family Partnership (NFP; three sites), Home-based Early Head Start (hereafter EHS-HBO; two sites), and Healthy Family America (HFA; five sites) programs. Data were collected between 1999 and 2004. Results indicated that NFP home visitors had bachelor’s degrees in nursing, while HFA and EHS home visitors were largely paraprofessionals. NFP and HFA home visitors reported the highest scores on job satisfaction. There were no significant differences between programs on frequency or quality of supervision or commitment to the intervention model. Qualitative data indicated a need for more initial training on challenging topics, a greater attention to supervision and support, clearer articulation of the intervention model, and issues related to job satisfaction. Implications for improving the experiences of home visitors are discussed in the context of current training and supervision practices. (author abstract)