View/Open - Dalhousie University

for some families, particularly those caregivers reluctant to get involved with
professional or formalized services. At the same time, the presence of front-line staff
and managers who can also work directly with families allows mixed-delivery programs
to welcome more vulnerable families into the fold, and then effectively respond to the
real and complex needs that may emerge. Given the increased risks to long-term wellbeing
faced by these families, and the corresponding economic, social and human costs,
those programs that can both engage and effectively serve these families should be
supported. The combination of a volunteer-based family home visiting program with
staff ‘reinforcements’ appears to be one such example.
8.5.2 ...Thus Enhancing the Entire System’s Ability to Serve These Families...
Skilled home visiting staff (and in some situations, skilled volunteers) can support
vulnerable parents in the complex process of accessing and navigating a wide range of
needed services. Home visitors can advocate for and with parents, and can facilitate the
development of essential interpersonal and self-advocacy skills – thus helping families
to not only connect with services, but to successfully stay connected with them. Thus,
findings from the present study suggest that programs that engage and retain families
with multiple risks and barriers, and also act in this facilitative capacity, actually improve
the entire system’s ability to serve, care for, and work with these families.
8.5.3 ...And Impacting the Long-term Development of Vulnerable Children
As discussed in Chapter 3, the published literature has highlighted that many
home visiting program models have a positive impact on parents, particularly mothers,
and on key aspect of parent-child relationships, such as attachment. However, the
findings are not as consistent these when it comes to demonstrating an impact on
children’s physical, cognitive, emotional or social development. In relation to
‘volunteer-only’ visiting programs, this finding could be because programs don’t attempt
to measure child outcomes (Byrne & Kemp, 2009), or that they do not have the research
and evaluation capacity for such measures, or that, since direct contact is most often
206