Case studies of factors interfering with nurse home visitors' promotion of positive care‐giving methods in high risk families

Abstract

A comprehensive program of prenatal and postpartum nurse home visitation for high‐risk families is examined. The overriding objective of the program was to improve child health and development by improving maternal prenatal health habits, qualities of caregiving, and informal and formal community social support. The homevisiting program was evaluated in the form of a field experiment, with comparison groups assigned essentially at random. In this report, three cases are examined in which the nurses were relatively unsuccessful in improving qualities of maternal caregiving. Particular emphasis is given to understanding psychological and social factors in the family that interfered with the nurses' efforts to promote positive caregiving. A comparison of the caregiving methods of the nurse‐visited and control‐group families at greatest risk indicated that even though the nurses were frustrated in their work with certain high‐risk families, without the nurses' help, the proportion of families using positive m...