Health visitor
I’m a health visitor, and I feel very privileged to be a health visitor.Health visitors are very unique in their role that they visit the well population, and they are actually invited as guests into people’s homes. So when we think about the role of the health visitor, the health visitor mainly works around public health. Like I said we visit the well population, and we work in partnership, we work in partnership, not just with the family, but we work in partnership inter-professionally with other health professionals, but we also work with other agencies, inter-agency, and we work with a whole host of different agencies. We work with social services, we work with education,we work with the voluntary sector. So when we say that we work in partnership it's working in partnership within the broadest term with a whole host different individuals and different organisations. We deal mainly within health promotion.For example we go in to promote health. Okay in a preventative mode,so to prevent thingshappening, not in a curative mode. For example, we might go in to a young family whose have just had a baby, and we might talk about sudden infant death syndrome,and the recommendations to reduce the incidence of sudden infant death.
So the kind of things that health visitors do and when would you get a health visitor. Health visitors are available for the whole population.However, whenever a family has a baby they will be given a health visitor. And sometimes that’s just one health visitor who is the named health visitor, and sometimes it will be a group of health visitors. And there is a move now towards more corporate working,in that there is a team of health visitors delivering care to a geographical area. Historically what we have done is been GP attached,and sometimes that’sstillhappeningthat you will have a health visitor who is attached to a GPservice. But more recently is that we have this corporate working, where we will have a group of health visitors who will deliver services to a geographical area. And that’s what we call corporate working. And we work toguidelines, to deliver best practice and evidence based practice and things that we work to are the child health promotion programme, the national service framework for children and various NICE documents that talk about ante natal care and care of the post delivery. So when you go out to the health visitor what sort of things can you do, what sort of things can you write in your PADS documents about your learning objectives? So things that you could write, you could gain more knowledge of how families are supported in the community;what kind of support is offered;you can gain more practicalknowledge of government initiatives that are SURE START, and how this has been implemented in practice; you can think about public healthroles, specific public health issues. For example infant feeding, breastfeeding, accident prevention. And I have already talked about inter agency working,so you can gain more information and more experience of how we communicate and how we work interagency and inter-professionally.
Okay so other things you might want to do, you might want to explore and gain more knowledge on safe guarding, about safe guarding children, also about the vulnerable adult,you might want to look at domestic abuse. You also might want to have a look at how familieshave changed so you might want to reflect on some of the theory that you have had here at university, and reflect how families have changed. You might have the experience of going out with the health visitor and observing families,how they respond and how a child, when a child is born and comes into the home how that effects the family life, and sometimes you know mums might get a little bit anxiety which might lead on to depression, and that might lead onto post natal depression. So you may be able to you know have some experience of anxiety and depression within the community. You mighthaveexperience of post natal depression for yourmother and child EU. Health visitors sometimes do ante natal visits, so you might want to talk about that, and health visitors also have a requirement to go and visit the family between fourteen and twenty eight days post delivery. So you will go out there and be able to see new babies. You might want to write up about breast feeding, or about child development, examinationof the new born baby.
When we think about the EU directive for learning difficulties, health visitors have case load of children,and sometimes that case load is about three hundred children that they are responsible for. And within those three hundred children there may be children, or maybe families, parents that have extra needs. So while it may not be appropriate for you to go and visit those families it may be appropriate if you ask the health visitor to look at those notes and review the kind of care that that family has had, and the kind of issues that come up, you will be able to do a reflection on that. So as you can see there are lots and lots of really exciting opportunities, a wealth of opportunities for you explore and to relate to the theory that you have had here in university. So I hope you have a wonderful time, I certainly do.
1
Health Visitor - August 2010