Community Parent programmes are managed or supported by an experienced midwife or health visitor. The role of a health practitioner and the coordinator are sometimes combined, or the health practitioner and programme coordinator work closely together.
The importance of having a health practitioner on board
A health practitioner gives other professionals outside the programme a little added confidence in who they are dealing with. It can be reassuring to the whole team that a health professional is involved in the programme, especially during the set-up stages in building the team’s confidence on areas such as safeguarding issues.
Key responsibilities
The health practitioner can help build relationships with strategic managers/leaders e.g.:
- Maternity providers
- NHS & local authority commissioners
- Health visiting team leads
- Early years managers
- Perinatal mental health managers and IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) services
- Public health and children’s services providers
- Social care providers.
In order to:
- Embed the programme alongside statutory services
- Influence collaborative working and sustainable funding
- Facilitate effective two-way relationships between the team and front-line professionals.
The health practitioner will assist with monitoring and evaluating quality, processes and outcomes and can also assist the coordinator in producing reports and updates for commissioners and stakeholders.
The role includes:
- Assessing the suitability of referrals, conducting risk assessment and ensuring safeguarding best practice
- Supporting volunteers and the staff team to deliver effective early prevention, evidence-based practice and maintain high standards of care for mothers, fathers, babies and families
- Providing advice and support for complex issues
- Providing clinical supervision to senior staff responsible for recruiting, training and supervising volunteers.
They will also keep the programme team up to date with relevant research and developments, including supporting compliance with legal and safeguarding requirements (e.g. reviewing and updating policies and procedures).
This part of the role includes working with the programme trainer to review and update the volunteer training, and ensure volunteers have access to high quality and up-to-date resources.
A health practitioner can draw on their experience of dealing with these issues and will deal confidently with multi-disciplinary teams.
They will:
- Build relationships with local NHS and local authority commissioners
- Champion the programme with co-professionals
- Advise on safeguarding and information sharing processes
- Update the programme team about evidence-based practice.
It takes hard work to not only set up the programme but also to build it up.
So, it’s important that the health practitioner is:
- Approachable, personable and a great communicator
- Very passionate about the peer support and strengths-based model
- Able to build relationships across the board
- Resilient, with good leadership and management skills
- Highly committed to a community development model.