Our Mission
The Institute of Health Visiting (iHV) is an independent charity, professional body and Centre of Excellence – established to strengthen the quality and consistency of health visiting practice, so that health visitors can effectively respond to the health needs of all babies, children, families and communities enabling them to achieve their optimum level of health, thereby reducing health inequalities.
Our Values
We believe that:
- Improving public health outcomes for babies, children, families and communities is at the heart of health visiting practice
- When appropriately resourced, health visiting provides a vital infrastructure of support that is central to improving public health outcomes and to reducing inequalities in health
- Ensuring the highest standards of education, research and practice means that health visitors can deliver a world-class service
- Health visiting leaders flourish in an environment of academic and professional excellence
We are fully committed to the active promotion of equality, diversity and inclusion in everything that we do. We want to enable an organisational culture that values diversity and we are committed to eliminating unlawful discrimination.
Our Vision and Objectives
Our Vision requires health visitors to play their fullest part within an integrated system to reduce health inequalities that arise in childhood and for the UK to achieve health outcomes on a par with the best in the world. This will be achieved by providing an effective health visiting service working in partnership with parents and carers, “working with, not doing to”, and part of a broader approach with others to ensure that every child has the best start in life.
The iHV was established to:
- Work to improve quality and consistency in health visiting practice by:
- acting as a Centre of Excellence for improving capacity, capability and professional development in health visiting, and
- setting professional standards for continuing professional development
- Build leadership in health visiting
- Create a forum for developing excellence in health visiting practice, including co-production with parents and carers
- Influence policies affecting health, and promote the benefits and importance of health visiting excellence
- Develop new effective ways to get key public health information to families, both directly, and through the health visiting infrastructure
- Strengthen research capability and capacity to develop the evidence base for health visiting.
