Health

1697 Words4 Pages

Health visitors are registered nurses who undergo extra training to work in the community with families and children under five. The main principles of health visiting are to ensure that children have a healthy and positive start to life by recognising health needs, encouraging health enhancing activities and influencing health policies (Craig and Lindsay, 2000). Health visitors provide the Healthy Child Programme (HCP) which allows all families access to services ranging from immunisations through to safeguarding. Although health visitors play a key part in the healthcare of families and children they also work closely with other health professionals in order to help families achieve optimum health. This essay will describe the health visiting role in more depth as well as discuss why immunisations are a key role in the health promotion undertaken by a health visitor. The first five years of a child's life are the most important for laying the foundation skills which will see them through to adulthood. In order to give children a positive start to life health visitors can offer advice and support by using the Healthy Child Programme (HCP) which can take place within a home or community environment. This programme offers families a range of services including screening, developmental reviews and support on parenting and making healthy decisions. Health visitors have the skills to identify children who may not be meeting their developmental milestones and refer them onto other services to meet their needs. They can also recognise and support safeguarding issues within a family. Although most people found these services to be beneficial a study conducted by Knott and Latter (1999) claimed that some mothers felt the services they ... ... middle of paper ... ... a service which can help individuals and communities maintain optimum health. Immunisations are important in preventing communicable disease and health visitors are the key professionals in ensuring that families are aware of the seriousness of disease as well as the safety of immunisations. One way of ensuring that children receive immunisations would be to make them compulsory however this would mean that freedom of choice is removed and health visitors would need to police the public to ensure that they are attending appointments. In reality it would not be ethical to develop a law for immunisations therefore health promotion is the most efficient way to encourage parents to get their child vaccinated. With time the immunisation programme will grow as more diseases need to be prevented making the health visitors role in promoting them become even more important.

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