Following our previous two articles about Safe Sleeping and the DGHD Home Infant Visitation Program, we wanted to follow up with the results of their project as reported to us by Joyce Richmond, RN, BS who was the Nursing Director for Delaware General Health District in 2015 when the study was completed.

How was the program chosen?

The newborn home visiting program was restarted after a 7-year lapse, due to grant funding cuts, and because the hospital also had stopped offering NBHV’s (New born Health Visits).

DGHD believed that an in-home RN (Registered Nurse) visit would benefit both mother and infant.

Ohio has a high infant mortality rate and DGHD wanted to ensure that problems or issues were picked up quickly, and that parents were educated on providing a safe sleep environment to reduce the risk of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).

DGHD also assessed for:

  • Postpartum depression
  • The importance of fully immunizing children on-time
  • Providing referrals to community resources to meet the needs of the family

In addition, DGHD also wanted to capture data to be able to show a need for this program in grant funding requests.

What steps did DGHD take to capture the information?

As part of the newborn home visiting program, DGHD wrote two pathways that mirrored out Mom’s post-partum assessment and their newborn assessment.

In the pathways DGHD included all of the items they wanted to be able to run reports on, so they could easily pull the data.

DGHD also decided which interventions of the home visit they wanted to measure with the KBS (Knowledge, Behavior and Status).

For the one-month project DGHD did a KBS for safe sleep environment, and for the three month project DGHD did a KBS for safe sleep environment and maternal post-partum depression.

After the first couple of weeks DGHD ran preliminary data and found that they needed to edit their pathway to include specific information that they wanted to capture with their own checkbox.

What were DGHD’s findings?

During the newborn home visiting program, DGHD found out that most parents had not been educated on what a safe sleep environment looked like, which really surprised them.

Their KBS ratings showed that parents had significant learning and the sleep environment was made safer, because of the education provided by the RN.

DGHD also found that some parents could not afford to provide a safe sleep environment, so through a small grant, they were able to purchase Pack-N-Plays through Cribs for Kids.

If the family needed a Crib, one was provided quickly.

What did DGHD learn from the project?

DGHD learned the value of doing the KBS to provide quantitative data on positive outcomes of their program to show the Board of Health, community partners, and potential funders.

Did DGHD’s findings validate what they thought they already knew?

DGHD was pretty sure that the newborn home visiting program was a needed service, and now they have proof and data that provides validation.

DGHD was also amazed at how fast they could produce a comprehensive report!

This project got them excited about Nightingale Notes and using the Omaha System for charting.

The KBS function of Nightingale Notes allowed the Delaware General Health District an easy, accessible way to evaluate their newborn home visiting program.

The results of this report shows that their public health nurses were able to better educate parents on how to create a safer home sleep environment for their infant thus ensuring better outcomes in the prevention of SIDS as a result of the program.

Conclusion

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank DGHD for completing this project, sharing their newborn home visiting program success with us, and for demonstrating some of the real-life features and capability of Nightingale Notes.

You can download a copy of Delaware General Health District’s 2015 One Month Project or Three Month Project for their Newborn Home Visiting Program.

If you’d like to know how Nightingale Notes can help you, and your health programs, why not contact us today at (507) 388-4141?