The Nurse-Family
Partnership is a community
health program aimed at transforming the lives of first-time moms and their
children. By implementing home visits to low-income, first-time moms,
registered nurses are able to provide them with the care and support they need
to ensure a healthy pregnancy as well as to properly care for their children
and to become self-sufficient economically. Starting from pregnancy until the
baby turns two, Nurse-Family Partnership forms trusting relationships with
first-time moms to make them more confident and empowered to seek a better life
for them and their children.
Founded on the works of David Olds, a
pediatrics, preventive medicine, and psychiatry professor at the University of
Colorado, the Nurse-Family Partnership was first administered to local communities
in Dayton, Ohio and some counties in Wyoming in 1996. Within the same year,
funding from the US Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention helped support the program’s dissemination to Los
Angeles, Fresno, Clearwater, St. Louis, and Oklahoma City.