Improving Maternal and Infant Health in Michigan: The Potential of Universal Home Visiting Outreach
Home visiting is an evidence-based strategy to promote the health and well-being of pregnant women, new mothers, and babies. Despite a large body of evidence documenting the success of home visiting in improving health outcomes, home visiting programs are persistently underutilized.1 There are a number of reasons why home visiting programs do not reach everyone who is eligible. Home visiting systems may not have the capacity to serve all who are eligible due to insufficient funding, lack of resources for outreach, and workforce shortages. Families may not know they are eligible for services, and thus never engage with the system. Other families may decline to participate in home visiting because they do not have time to participate, do not want someone coming into their home, or feel that the program simply is not for them.
Key findings
- Home visiting programs have demonstrated numerous benefits for pregnant women, new parents, and infants. Most new parents can benefit from extra help and support when bringing a new baby into the world. All families should have access to the types of supports home visiting provides if they need it.
- While most maternal-infant home visiting programs target services to specific socioeconomic or demographic groups, a universal approach that provides screening and needed services to all women may improve awareness, potentially improve maternal and infant health, and signal that home visiting is the standard of care for all new mothers.
- Several universal approaches to home visiting operate in other regions of the United States and have demonstrated promising impacts on parenting behaviors, connections to social services, and health care use.
- A number of states have passed legislation encouraging universal approaches to home visiting, including Hawaii, Maine, and Oregon, which recently passed legislation encouraging statewide expansion of an existing universal home visiting program. However, no state as large as Michigan has taken a universal home visiting model to scale thus far.
- Michigan provides an promising context for piloting a universal approach to home visiting screening, assessment, and referral to test whether it reaches more women with pregnancy-related risk factors, and shows population-level impacts on infant and maternal mortality.
- However, a key to ensuring the success of such programs will be identifying appropriate funding and bolstering community capacity. Other states and localities have leveraged a variety of funding streams to help support similar initiatives.
