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Indian River County Healthy Start Coalition, Inc. Healthy Families Indian River Program • Children's Services Advisory Committee Grant 2006-07 C. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION (Entire Section C, I — 6, not to exceed two pages) 1 . List Priority Needs area addressed. Parental Support and Education: supporting caregivers, a child' s most important resource, to be and do what is needed to shepherd children to adulthood in a safe, healthy, nurturing and productive manner. 2. Briefly describe program activities including location of services. HF Florida and the Florida Department of Health have collaborated to develop a Universal Prenatal Screen. The screen is offered to the pregnant woman on her first obstetric (OB) visit with her prenatal care provider and the screens dramatically improve the referral process. HF-1RC receives the screens from the HS Care Coordination office and makes contact with all pregnant mothers who had an initial positive screen for HF. Services can be initiated either prenatally or up to two weeks after the birth of the target child and this is determined prior to assessment. Once the positive HF screen is received the FAW conducts a face-to-face two-hour comprehensive assessment to determine if she would be eligible for HF services. Healthy Families is a voluntary, intensive home visitation program that occurs on a weekly basis. Caseloads are designed to be kept to fewer than 25 families to ensure the intensity of the home-based services are manageable. Intensity and duration decrease over time as a result of the parents' achievement of goals. Services take place in the home. Family Support Workers (FSW) are highly trained and supervised paraprofessionals who provide services focusing on parent/child bonding, infant/child growth and development, well baby care and immunization compliance. They support the family by empowering them to set and achieve goals. HF IRC encourages and helps families become employed as a number of the families are unemployed. One hundred percent of the families being served have conformed to their well child/EPSTD standards (which includes immunizations), with a significant majority of the families surveyed showing overall satisfaction with services. 3. Briefly describe how your program addresses the stated need/problem. Describe how your program follows a recognized "best practice" (see definition on page 12 of the Instructions) and provide evidence that indicates proposed strategies are effective with target population. HF works with families at risk for child abuse by addressing and modeling parenting behavior that will improve parent/child interactions, thereby enhancing the child' s mental health, physical health and physical development. The HF program is modeled after the highly successful national HF America; an initiative that is based on critical program elements that have been defined by over 20 years of research and represent best practices in home visitation. HF Florida, which is the state-based administrator of all HF programs, contracted with a research and evaluation firm to conduct overall program evaluation. In a report presented in. April 2002, itfoundthat 98% of all children who participated- in HF had no finding of child maltreatment or substantiated child abuse. The national HF initiative has many years of research and has demonstrated the success of the Healthy Families' model as an effective means of promoting positive enhancing family functioning and preventing child maltreatment. 4. List staffing needed for your program, including required experience and estimated hours per week in program for each staff member and/or volunteers (this section should conform with the information in the Position Listing on the Budget Narrative Worksheet), Project Manager ( 1 Full Time Equivalent - FTE) - Masters degree in social work, psychology, 6