Nurse-Family Partnerships: From Trials to International Replication - NIJ Research for the Real World Seminar

• NCJ Number: 234692
• Author(s): David Olds
• Date Published: January 2010
• Length: 8 pages
• Agencies: NIJ
• Publication Type: Program/Project Evaluation; Program/Project Description; Presentation (Multimedia); Conference Material

Annotation

This is the video and transcript of the presentation of Dr. David Olds at one of the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ's) Research for the Real World Seminar, in which he discusses the 19-year follow-up study to his well-known research on the Nurse Home Visiting Program, which has evolved from trials to international replication.

Abstract

The Nurse-Family Partnership program currently provides nurse visitations to more than 20,000 mothers each year in communities in 20 different States around the country. Dr, Olds discusses findings from the Elmira (NY) study site as well as sites in Memphis and Denver. His work initially began in Elmira with the first randomized, controlled trial some 20 years ago. Included in the outcomes from this study are the health behaviors, arrests, and convictions among the mothers and the early childhood health and behavior of their children. In his current presentation, Dr. Olds focuses on the outcomes for the children 19 years after their mothers received nurse visits to their homes, both during their pregnancies and during the first 2 years after their births. The Elmira study found that by the time the children were 15, there was about a 50-percent difference between treatment and control children in the rates of State-verified reports of child abuse and neglect and approximately a 60-percent treatment-control difference in arrests. These differences were even greater among those children born to mothers at greater socio-demographic risk. Based on the results of the trials, the researchers are confident that nurse visits can improve women's prenatal health, especially reduction in tobacco use and hypertension disorders in pregnancy, as well as reductions in childhood injuries, which improves positive development in the children.