The National Home Visiting Resource Center recently released a new Data Supplement to the 2017 Home Visiting Yearbook providing updated data on early childhood home visiting, a proven service delivery strategy that helps children and families thrive.
The Data Supplement builds on an inaugural Yearbook, released last summer, which painted a first-of-its-kind picture of home visiting using the best available data from 2015. The National Home Visiting Resource Center examined publicly available data and collected new data—this time from 2016—to present a more complete and up-to-date look at home visiting in action. The supplement’s robust data reflect advancements in data collection. For example, the supplement includes service information from 14 evidence-based home visiting models, up from 7 in the 2017 Home Visiting Yearbook.
Among the highlights:
- More than 300,000 families received evidence-based home visiting services in 2016 over the course of more than 3.8 million home visits.
- About 18 million pregnant women and families (including more than 23 million children) could benefit from home visiting but were not being reached in 2016.
- Evidence-based home visiting was implemented in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, 5 territories, 24 tribal communities, and 47 percent of U.S. counties in 2016.
- From 2010 to 2017, the federal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV) strengthened home visiting by supporting services, research, and local infrastructure. MIECHV expired in September 2017 but was reauthorized in February 2018 for 5 more years.
- In 2016, MIECHV helped fund services for 83,841 families in states, territories, and tribal organizations—a portion of the total families served by home visiting that year.
- States supported home visiting by combining funds from tobacco settlements and taxes, lotteries, and budget line items in 2016. With limited resources, states are continually working to expand the reach of home visiting to serve as many families as they can in ways that make sense at the local level.
Florida’s updated state profile reports more than 15,500 families – including 15,200 children – received more than 154,500 home visits in 2016 from more than 102 agencies. Models implemented in the state included Child First, Early Head Start, Family Check-Up, Healthy Families America, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters, Minding the Baby, Nurse-Family Partnership, and Parents as Teachers. The report notes more than 980,000 families in the state with children under age six could benefit from home visiting programs. Detailed information on families and services provided through FL MIECHV is available in the 2017 FL MIECHV Demographics and Utilization Report.