Research Report: Evaluating the contribution of the Family Nurse Partnership

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SUMMARY

The government has promoted the use of the Family Nurse Partnership, an early intervention programme designed to offer disadvantaged new parents tailored help and support from a specialist nurse in the home in the weeks and months after childbirth. This paper, Community Intervention to Prevent Child Maltreatment in England: Evaluating the Contribution of the Family Nurse Partnership, aims to show that targeting the scheme at families with different risk factors than those currently used would increase cost effectiveness and prevent more cases of child abuse and neglect.

Researchers analysed data from a previous study of 14,252 families in the Surrey area, in which newborns were followed over five years to explore risk factors and incidents of child abuse and neglect. The original research found that seven per cent of families had five or more factors that made them more likely to abuse their child, and one in 13 of these went on to abuse their child in the next five years, in comparison with one in 400 low-risk families.