Building a Future: A Career Pathway in Health Visiting

The Institute of Health Visiting (iHV) publishes a pathway for a career in health visiting.

Across all UK nations, governments are looking to build a health and care workforce fit for the future. This includes responding to changes in our population’s needs and investing in prevention and public health to ensure that people can live longer, healthier and happier lives. There is also much greater awareness of the evidence for investing in the earliest years of life as a critical period to build strong foundations for future health and reduce the risks for diseases that are largely preventable – it is clear that health visitors are needed now more than ever.

But, at the same time, we have significant workforce shortages in health visiting, which is impacting on parents’ experience, service capacity and constrains our ability to transform services to improve support for families with babies and young children. Rebuilding the workforce will take time. The solution rests on building worthwhile and attractive career opportunities in health visiting at all levels – whether practitioners are just entering the field or looking to progress in the profession to more senior roles.

Our career pathway sets out health visiting career options. It draws on the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan’s priorities to “train, retain and reform” in order to build workforce capacity and capability and support practitioners to have worthwhile careers in health visiting.

Health visiting is a form of public health practice dedicated to creating good health. Health visitors embrace strengths-focused relational approaches and take account of the setting and circumstances impacting on a person’s life. These features, and the primary goal of health creation, define health visiting as a distinctive form of nursing and is an area of public health within which a whole career can be grown.

The Career Pathway for Health Visiting has been designed as a resource for workforce planning. It includes the different job roles contributing to health visiting provision and maps these against levels of practice that reflect registration status, educational development, expertise, and responsibility.

The downward trend in total health visitor workforce numbers in England needs urgently addressing (see our news story Health visiting in the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan: In brief). The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan published in June 2023 signals a commitment to address the shortfall, which needs action not only on recruitment but also retention. The iHV recognises the use of skill mix roles and has developed the career pathway with entry and progression in mind. It sets out possibilities for movement towards a health visitor qualification and beyond, through advanced practice.

The imperative is for employers to invest in new talent and harness expertise whilst helping individuals see where their ambition can take them when health visiting is their chosen career.

More details about the Career Pathway in Health Visiting will be shared by Dr Karen Whittaker at the iHV Leadership conference on 6 December 2023 – an event that can be joined in-person or online (in-person ticket sales close Friday 24 November). See https://ihv.org.uk/events/leadership-conference-2023/ for booking details.

Go to iHV Career Pathway in Health Visiting

To cite this infographic, please use the link to the pdf here: https://bit.ly/47GEm9Q

Please also see:

‘Becoming a health visitor’ to consider how to prepare for education and training as a health visitor;
Our short iHV films “Health visiting in your community” and “Voices from Practice” to gain an insight into the breadth and depth of health visitors’ work with every family.

National Bereavement Care Pathway helps improve care received by parents

A project to improve the quality of care that bereaved families receive when their baby dies has been found to be making a big difference, and should be rolled out nationally, a new study has found.

To ensure bereaved parents and their families are supported in the best way possible, the National Bereavement Care Pathway (NBCP) was launched in 2017 and has been piloted in 32 NHS Trusts in England. The NBCP helps professionals to provide families with a greater consistency and quality of bereavement care after pregnancy or baby loss.

Independent research previously highlighted improvements made in the 11 Wave one sites when it reported its findings in October 2018. The final report relating to 21 Wave two sites published May 2019 analyses the experiences of bereavement care from parents and healthcare professionals.

The results have revealed high levels of satisfaction with the bereavement care they received when their baby died. Parents also said the hospital was a caring and supportive environment, they were treated with respect and many feel the decisions they made in the hospital were the right ones at the time.

Download NBCP Wave two report (May 2019)

Collaborators in the project, including the Institute of health Visiting, are calling on NHS Trusts to adopt the National Bereavement Care Pathway and adhere to nine specific bereavement care standards.

Since the Pathway was introduced, more health care professionals feel they now have consistent and clear guidelines which support them to provide good quality care for bereaved parents. The Pathway has improved the dialogue between hospital departments which has helped professionals to deliver care more consistently.

NHS Trusts are being encouraged to take up the NBCP as part of the collaboration’s roll out plans. A number have already taken part in local workshops to identify gaps in local practice and to develop plans to improve bereavement care, based on the 9 bereavement care standards promoted by the group.

Further information regarding these standards, how to register with the pathway and other details can be found at www.nbcpathway.org.uk

The National Bereavement Care Pathway is being led by: Sands (Stillbirth and neonatal death charity), Bliss, The Lullaby Trust, The Miscarriage Association, ARC (Antenatal Results & Choices), Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Royal College of Midwives, Royal College of Nursing, Royal College of General Practitioners, Neonatal Nurses Association, Institute of Health Visiting, NHS England.

PHE – call for Speech, language and communication local practice and pathway examples

Call for good local practice and pathway examples:

Speech, language and communication local practice and pathway (0-5 years)
Evidence-based speech, language and communication training for health visitors/ health visiting teams

Public Health England has formed a partnership with the Department for Education as part of their Social Mobility Action Plan to address the “word gap” and the inequalities associated with speech, language and communication needs in the early years. They are pleased to share the first of a series of regular communications with you in this briefing by Wendy Nicholson.

The programme of work will include training for health visitors on speech, language and communication needs; the introduction of an early language assessment tool to support clinical decision-making; and the development of a model pathway for services for children 0-5 years to promote language and early identification/ interventions for children with speech, language and communication needs.

There are some excellent examples of innovative, evidence-driven practice in parts of the country and PHE would like to learn from your experiences and work with you to develop a model pathway for speech, language and communication for children 0-5 years.

If you would like to be involved in this work, please complete a short case study example describing the model/ training that you have developed and any evidence of outcomes.

Please submit your case studies to [email protected] by COP Tuesday 29 May (if you are unable to meet this deadline – please get in touch with Alison directly).

PHE will review all case studies and plan to hold a workshop at the end of June/ beginning of July at Wellington House in London to develop the pathway. They will be inviting representatives from areas with good practice examples to join with them and members of their Expert Advisory Group to develop this programme of work.

If you would like to discuss your ideas informally, please contact Alison Morton by email and she will arrange a call.

Download Wendy Nicholson briefing

Download short case study example

National Bereavement Care Pathway for pregnancy and baby loss

The Institute is pleased to be one of the key partners in the project group working to deliver a National Bereavement Care Pathway (NBCP) for England, with the support of Department of Health and All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Baby Loss.

This invaluable project, led by SANDS, includes partners from professional bodies, charities, parents and families with the aim of ensuring that all bereaved parents are offered equal, high quality, individualised, safe and sensitive care following pregnancy and baby loss (up to 1 year of age).

Pilot sites for the roll-out of the pathway and guidance materials were launched on 9 October (to coincide with Baby Loss Awareness Week) and will be independently evaluated, with the second wave of the pilot planned for April 2018.

We are really keen to support the project group with identification of community health providers (which employ health visitors) that are willing to be included in the second pilot phase – to ensure that the pathway offers clear, consistent guidance to health visitors to enable them to work confidently alongside parents, providing compassionate and parent-centred care to those affected through use of the pathway.

If you would like to know more about becoming a pilot site please contact Project Lead Marc Harder ([email protected]).

Look out for further news about the NBCP or tweets with hashtag #nbcp.

Read Marc's latest blog

National Bereavement Care Pathway Project

Pilot sites for the roll out of the pathway and guidance materials are being launched on 9 October (to coincide with Baby Loss Awareness Week) and will be independently evaluated, with the second wave of the pilot planned for April 2018.

If you would like to know more about becoming a pilot site please contact Project Lead Marc Harder ([email protected]).

Look out for further news about the NBCP or tweets with hashtag #nbcp.

See Marc’s latest blog