In support of World Autism Acceptance Week 2022 (28 March – 3 April), we are delighted to tell you about our fantastic upcoming training opportunity for you to become a Changing Conversations: Autism & Supporting Behaviour Ambassador.

The aim of the programme is to equip you to be Ambassadors for Changing Conversations when supporting families when they have concerns that their child may have autism.

This is a hosted event, and you will have the opportunity to network and share practice with HVs from other areas and organisations. The training is suitable for qualified health visitors with an interest in neurodiversity and supporting parents of autistic children. You will also be offered the opportunity to receive additional training to support you to:

  • share your learning with your health visitor colleagues.
  • enhance the support that health visitors offer to these families.

This one day Ambassador training event will equip HVs to act as advocates for parents with children who may be autistic. It will introduce resources including: Good Practice Points, Parent Tips, films, case studies, parent and child stories, along with collated research and literature to support a broader knowledge base and provide quality-assured resources that families can be signposted to. Finally, there is a PowerPoint Awareness session that Ambassadors can share with colleagues.

Objectives of the training

  • To raise awareness of the specific needs of families of children with autism
  • To understand what a child’s behaviour is communicating, and how to support families
  • To apply learning to wider early intervention with all families
  • To be aware of evidence-based practice for HVs in this subject
  • To be able to access resources to consolidate learning and support practice

Book your place today

Demand is high – so don’t miss out on this great opportunity.

Changing Conversations: Autism & Supporting Behaviour Ambassador Training

  • Date: 18 May 2022
  • Time: 09:00-16:30
  • Location: Online via Zoom

Cost: iHV Members: £200
Non-Members: £225

How to book

To apply, send your completed application form to [email protected]

Participant feedback:

“ Thank-you. The training was amazing.”

“The views and feeling of those with autism were insightful and useful. After all, who better to tell us what a lived experience is like than those living it!”

“I feel all health visiting and early years staff should attend this training. It can make a positive impact on practice”

 

“I was blown away by all the information in this toolkit. It really is going to be beneficial for myself and my colleagues to use”

“The information contained in this kit is very informative and has changed my practice, just what we need to support children with autism”

 

“I feel more confident to offer parents possible strategies to cope with their child’s distressed behaviour”

“I will be listening better to parents when they share concerns and try to unpick with them more what they are experiencing with their child”

Working in a pandemic has brought many challenges to both families and the health visiting service – but, unsurprisingly, the health visiting service in many areas has risen to these challenges with great professionalism, developing many innovations and workarounds to ensure that children and families receive the support that they need.

But you can’t pour from an empty cup and it is still important for health visitors to have time to reflect and learn during this pandemic which may continue for many weeks. To help you, we are pleased to publish today a bundle of five fabulous Good Practice Points, as well as hold our first virtual online iHV Member Event tomorrow (Thursday) on “COVID-19 in children and managing minor childhood illnesses”.

As a Centre of Excellence, the Institute supports the development of universally high quality health visiting practice so that health visitors can effectively respond to the health needs of all children, families and communities, enabling them to achieve their optimum level of health, thereby reducing health inequalities. To achieve our aim, we are constantly working to improve and develop benefits for our health visitor Associate and Student members, and our Friend members who work closely with health visiting  services.

We know through feedback from our membership surveys that our Good Practice Points (GPPs) are the resources most valued by our members. We try to write Good Practice Points that are relevant to health visitors and where there might be gaps currently.  We write GPPs with the help of authors that are experts and informative, give the evidence base and enable health visitors to be better equipped in their clinical practice.

Good Practice Points (GPPs) are available for members of the iHV; and Parent Tips (PTs) are available to parents who access our website or via health visitors sharing them – we work with parents to develop our Parent Tips.

New resources

Today, we are pleased to publish a selection of new GPPs to support our members in practice. These are:

Any new GPP/PT Topics or would you like to be involved?

We would really love to hear from you if you have any specific topics that you think would benefit from having  a GPP and/ or PT created, or if you would like to write a GPP or PT, or if you would like to be involved in our peer review process.  Peer reviewers look at all GPPs and PTs during our production process and we feed their comments back to the author.

Please contact [email protected]  if you would like to find out more about getting involved or with your thoughts and ideas of new GPPs and PTs.


Please note that GPPs are available to iHV members only.

If you’re not a member, please join us to get access to all of our resources.

The iHV is a self-funding charity – we can only be successful in our mission to strengthen health visiting practice if the health visiting profession and its supporters join us on our journey. We rely on our membership to develop new resources for our members.

So do join us now!

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An interesting survey of people’s health-related behaviour has just been released.  There is a plan to repeat it bi-annually.

This report is based on the first of a series of bi-annual surveys which aim to feed into the evaluation of the Department of Health (DH) Social Marketing strategy. The surveys will track core health behaviours, their interactions and influences, and how these vary across lifecourses. The March 2012 survey forms a baseline against which changes over time and seasonal variations can be assessed.