Objective To explore fathers’ experiences with a Norwegian home visiting program during the prenatal period and the first‐year postpartum. Design Qualitative design with interpretive description (ID) as the methodological approach. Sample Individual interviews with fathers (n = 13) who received home visits by a public health nurse (PHN) within the New Families home visiting program. Measures Interviews were guided by a semi‐structured interview‐guide, which contained open‐ended questions encouraging informants to reflect on their experiences with home visits. The analysis of the data was informed by content analysis. Results Two main themes that reflect the fathers’ experiences emerged: (1) The importance of being on their home ground captures the fathers’ experience of receiving home visits and building a trusting relationship with the PHN. (2) Including fathers in the home visit represents their thoughts about the content and focus of the home visits. Conclusions Fathers experienced the universal New Families home visiting program as an important contribution towards a more available and tailored service, with the home environment as a suitable arena for developing a trusting relationship with the PHN. However, the fathers often felt insufficiently included in the home visits, with only scant attention towards them as independent caregivers, their emotional reactions, roles, and family relationships. Pre‐birth home visits might contribute to strengthening preparations for fatherhood and increase fathers’ engagement in the Child Health Service.

Introduction: The Norwegian government is addressing the need for increased voluntary work in the municipal care sector. Several reforms over the last decades have transferred important care tasks to the municipalities, as it is a political aim for people to live longer in their own homes. Despite important structural changes in the provision of public care services, less attention has been devoted to the investigation of how voluntary work interacts with the overall development of care tasks within municipal care services. This paper aims to discover how the contribution of volunteers matches the current needs of service recipients and the daily work of professional staff and, additionally, to discover what level of volunteer competence and qualifications are considered necessary when cooperating with staff.

Becoming a father involves major changes in roles, identity and life

Men often experience depressive symptoms during the transition to parenthood, but there is a lack of synthesized knowledge of instruments used to identify such symptoms. The aim of this scoping review was to identify instruments used to measure symptoms of depressive symptoms among fathers in pregnancy and the postpartum period, and to describe the instruments’ characteristics and measurement properties. We identified studies published since 1990 through searches in databases such as MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsycINFO and in gray literature. Pairs of reviewers selected relevant studies based on predetermined inclusion criteria. For each included study, we collected information relevant to the review question, guided by the COnsensus based Standards for the selection of health status Measurement INstruments (COSMIN). We included 13 instruments, described in 59 studies with about 29,000 participants across 25 countries. There were 12 validation studies. None of the instruments were uniquely developed for assessing paternal depressive symptoms related to fatherhood. The three most extensively examined instruments were the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, and Beck Depression Inventory. For seven of the 13 instruments, there was no information reported about the instruments’ properties beyond internal consistency, but for the other six instruments the 12 validation studies reported on both reliability and validity. No studies reported on measurement error or responsiveness. EPDS was both the most extensively assessed instrument and reported to be the most reliable and valid. Further research on instruments for identifying men with depression in pregnancy and the postpartum period is warranted.

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