Health visitor education for today's Britain: Messages from a narrative review of the health visitor literature

Abstract

(300 words)Objectives: This paper draws on a narrative review of the literature, commissioned to support the Health Visitor Implementation Plan (DH, 2011a), and aimed at identifying messages about the knowledge, skills and abilities needed by health visitors to work within the current system of health care provision.Design: The scoping study and narrative review used three complementary approaches: a broad search, a structured search and a seminal paper search to identify empirical papers from the health visitor literature for review. The key inclusion criteria were messages of relevance for practice.Data Sources: 378 papers were reviewed. These included empirical papers from the United Kingdom (UK) from 2004 -February 2012, older research identified in the seminal paper search and international literature from 2000-January 2016.Review Methods: The review papers were read by members of the multi-disciplinary research team which included health visitor academics, social scientists and a clinical psychologist managed the international literature. Thematic content analysis was used to identify main messages. These were tabulated and shared between researchers in order to compare emergent findings and to confirm dominant themes.Results: The analysis identified an 'orientation to practice' based on salutogenesis (health creation), human valuing (person-centred care) and viewing the person in situation (human ecology) as the aspirational core of health visitors' work. This was realised through home visiting, needs assessment and relationship formation at different levels of service provision. A wide range of knowledge, skills and abilities were required, including knowledge of health as a process and skills in engagement, building trust and making professional judgments .These are currently difficult to impart within a 45 week health visitor programme and are facilitated through ad hoc post registration education and training. The international literature reported both similarities and differences between the working practices of health visitors in the UK and public health nurses worldwide. Challenges related to the education of each were identified.Conclusions: The breadth and scope of knowledge, skills and abilities required by health visitors makes a review of current educational provision desirable. Three potential models for health visitor education are described.

Models and frameworks that enable nurses to develop their public health practice—A scoping study

“…Each selected paper presented an account of an educational research project, or an evaluation of an educational intervention, which directly addressed the topic of our scoping study. In addition, six other papers were identified from a narrative review by Malone, Whittaker, Cowley, Ezhova, and Maben (2016), which extracted messages for the education of UK public health nurses, health visitors.…”

“…The one selected study from the UK (Turner‐Wilson, Mills, & Rees, 2017) describes the introduction of a public health improvement theme within an undergraduate nursing curriculum with a public health module in each year of a three‐year programme. Malone's et al (2016) review identifies the difficulties of facilitating postqualification public health nurses in the UK, specifically health visitors, development of core skills in health creation, human valuing and viewing the person in situation within the constraints of a 45‐week postqualification programme.…”

“…In the UK study, Turner‐Wilson et al (2017) described faculty guiding first year student nurses through an exploration of their own (students’) health beliefs and health behaviours as a means of understanding the beliefs and barriers they will inevitably encounter with individuals and families they will work with. Malone's et al (2016) review described student health visitors working closely with practice‐based health visitor teachers (practice teachers) either in one‐to‐one relationships or with one student at the centre of a network of teachers in practice one of whom held an educational qualification.…”

Contributions of Preventive Social Services in Early Childhood Home Visiting in a Disadvantaged Area of Sweden: The Practice of the Parental Advisor

“…This description seems to come close also to how the parental advisors act in the meeting with parents. Home visiting studies have further indicated that these kinds of facilitation or relationship skills are developed from a combination of theoretical study and practical experience (Duggan et al, 2018;Stern, 2008) and to acquire them takes considerable time (Malone et al, 2016).…”

What makes health visiting successful—or not? 1. Universality

“…This may be by health visitors providing additional services themselves or, as these mothers reported in the user study (Donetto et Such targeting may be short-term, as in these examples, or may include longer term interventions at the level of the universal plus or universal partnership plus, as indicated above. The multi-faceted nature of health visiting provision requires significant skills, identified in the programme of research and explored in more depth in Malone et al (2016). Our research focused on provision by qualified health visitors.…”