Enhancing Home Visiting With Mental Health Consultation

Abstract

Home visiting programs have been successful in engaging and enrolling families who are at high risk for stress, depression, and substance abuse. However, many of these mothers may not be receiving mental health services because home visitors lack the knowledge and skills to identify mental health or determine how to appropriately address these problems. In response, a growing number of home visiting programs are expanding their capacity by integrating a mental health provider into their ongoing operations. This approach, referred to as early childhood mental health consultation, involves a partnership between a professional consultant with early childhood mental health expertise and home visiting or family support programs, staff, and families. This integrated model holds the promise of promoting parent and child behavioral health by enhancing the capacity of home visitors to identify and appropriately address the unmet mental health needs of children and families. The article highlights efforts under way in several federally funded Linking Actions for Unmet Needs in Children’s Health Project sites where local programs are testing the effectiveness of this model.

Addressing maternal depression in home visiting: Findings from the home visiting collaborative improvement and innovation network

“…A growing body of research highlights the importance of integrating into HV programs those interventions that are efficacious in both treating [35][36][37] and preventing [38,39] postpartum depression. Building on work conducted in other early childhood settings [40], HV programs have employed mental health consultants to build the capacity of home visitors to support the mental health needs of perinatal women and their children [41,42] and to promote practices that enhance depression screening and referral [43].…”

Addressing Early Adversity Through Mental Health Consultation in Early Childhood Settings

“…The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) provides funding to states and tribal communities to promote and prevent mental health problems in pregnant women and children up to age 8. One of the required strategies is ECMHC, and many of the grantees are implementing and evaluating strategies for embedding mental health consultants into home visiting programs because of the high level of need resulting from exposure to early adversity (Goodson, Mackrain, Perry, O'Brien, & Gwaltney, ).…”

Exploring a model for infant and early childhood mental health consultation in early childhood home visiting

“…Recent studies have piloted IECMHC in home visiting through Project LAUNCH (Goodson, Mackrain, Perry, O'Brien, & Gwaltney, ). These projects included four types of consultation supports: (a) training for home visitors on mental health related topics, (b) group and individual supervision with home visitors, (c) consultation about specific children and families, and (d) information‐sharing with home visitors on mental health community resources for families.…”

“…These activities represented supports in each of the four categories of consultative work identified by Goodson et al. (): Training for home visitors on mental health related topics . The MHC provided core ECPBIS training, materials, resources, and tools to home visitors as well as ongoing, as‐needed consultation and supports to home visitors.…”