• A comprehensive manual prepared by experienced Canadian experts in early intervention, child development, home visiting, and family support.
• Evidence based strategies for home based interventions.
• References to additional information and resources.
• Diverse learning formats including group work, expert presentation, case studies, video analysis, professionally designed simulations, and panels.
• Customized to reflect provincial programs and structures.
• Delivered by a blend of Invest in Kids and provincially-based experts.

• To raise the level of knowledge and skills of professionals that home visit high-risk families with young children.
• Affirm the valuable role of the professional home visitor in the lives of families.
• Enhance the competency of professionals in collaborating, gaining access to resources, and working in an interdisciplinary way to benefit families.
• Facilitate the integration of new insights, knowledge, and skills in participants' own practice of identifying, reaching, engaging, and building effective relationships with high-risk families.

A GUIDE TO PROFESSIONAL HOME VISITING: A STRATEGY FOR INTERVENTION WITH HIGH RISK FAMILIES

1. Setting the Context
   Focus:
   • Dominant issues in multiproblem families
   • Advantages and benefits of home visiting
   • Research highlights on effectiveness of home visiting
   • Diversity of knowledge and skills of different professional disciplines who home visit
   • Process of high risk home visiting: locating, building a trusting relationship, assessment and intervention, level of visitation and disengagement
   • Clinical competencies



2. Self-Care
   Focus:
   • Value and importance of self care in response to the “cost of caring”
   • Workplace stressors/organization
   • Impact of burnout and vicarious trauma
   • Impact of emotions evoked from ongoing work with overburdened families
   • Ecological model for prevention of STS



3. Risk and Protective Factors
   Focus:
   • Summary of research on risk and protective factors, their complex interplay and how they influence healthy child development
   • Discussion of factors – the child; parental attitudes, behaviours and interactions; and parental history and current psychological functioning
   • Review of two approaches that assess factors and facilitate planning of interventions



4. Healthy Child Development Continuum
   Focus:
   • Review of current research and link to practice
   • Brain development and biological embedding
   • Developmental tasks of self-regulation, communication; and reasoning and problem solving
   • Comfort, Play and Teach activities



5. Cultural Diversity
   Focus:
   • Cultural competency in professional home visiting
   • Examination of personal values, beliefs and attitudes
   • Challenges of working with families from diverse cultural backgrounds
   • The social-contextual framework of child development
   • Strategies to establish and maintain culturally competent interactions



6. Screening and Assessment
   Focus:
   • Distinct purposes and characteristics of screening and assessment
   • Common instruments
   • Family-centred, ecological team approaches to screening and assessment
   • Strategies and techniques for in-home interviews and observations
   • Integrating and analyzing assessment information to plan interventions



7. Interdisciplinary Approach to Practice
   Focus:
   • Benefits of an interdisciplinary practice model on family and systems levels
   • Principles and key characteristics
   • Skills, processes and structures at the personal, professional and institutional level necessary for implementation



8. Engaging Hard to Reach Families
   Focus:
   • Awareness of both professional and family attitudes and factors that make engagement difficult
   • Steps necessary to establish and build a working alliance
   • Strategies for successful first contact
   • Strategies for the ongoing development of a working relationship
   • Skills, knowledge and personal qualities that contribute to a working relationship



9. Intervention and Family Support Strategies
   Focus:
   • Essential principles that guide interventions
   • Intervention approaches that focus on the child, the parent and the parent-child relationship



10. Teen Parenting
    Focus:
    • Research on adolescent parenting
    • Factors that affect teens who are pregnant and/or parenting
    • Engagement strategies
    • Strengthening parenting competencies



11. Parental Health Issues
    Focus:
    • Symptoms of and parenting issues arising from mental health and sensory challenges
    • Risks to child development
    • Practical intervention strategies to reduce risk of compromised child development



12. Family Violence and Child Abuse
    Focus:
    • Indicators of child abuse and family violence
    • How child abuse and family violence impact child development
    • Appropriate responses to disclosure and legislative reporting
    • Specific intervention and review of community collaboration, coordination and cooperation