Health Visiting service

Description

Our health visitors provide a range of services to support you on your parenting journey, from getting ready to be parents and giving birth, to your child’s toddler years and starting school. The service is broken into small teams that work across the district, meeting families at home and at the local family hubs. Each team includes health visitors (Specialist Community Public Health Nurses), staff nurses and community nursery nurses.

Being new parents can be exciting but a bit worrying as well. Your health visitor can help you on a broad range of areas from your baby’s sleeping pattern, to teething and toilet training, as well as helping you to look after yourself.

On our specialist Family Health services website Better Lives, Healthy Futures we have a dedicated Health Visiting section where you can find out all the information you need to know about the team and how they will support you.

Our team

Our health visitors are all fully qualified nurses that have specialist training in baby and children’s health and in supporting families. They work with a range of different people like your local doctor, your midwife and local nurseries and child minders, to help you. We also have community nursery nurses that work with our health visitors to support you on your child’s development, including behaviour management, sleep, weaning and toileting. The nursery nurse is often the person that contacts you to complete your scheduled visits.

When do we visit you?

We will visit you and your baby at six key stages from 0-2-and-a-half years, to check you and your baby are healthy and developing well. We will see you before your baby is born, shortly after your baby’s birth and at 6-8 weeks, 3-4 months, 9-12 months and 2-2 ½ years.  Your child will then see their School Nurse for routine health checks and for any further support that they may need. But if you’re worried about something in-between visits, you can always contact us to get extra support.

Read a more detailed summary of how the Health Visiting service can support your and your family.

How can you access the service?

All new parents will automatically be contacted by their Health Visitor so you don’t need to worry about setting this up. You can meet them wherever is best for you – at home, at your local doctor, your community or children’s centre. You can tell us what suits you at our first meeting, before you give birth.

We usually visit between 8.30am and 5.00pm, Monday to Friday. If you need help outside these hours, you should contact the local service that usually provides out-of-hours support like your pharmacy, or for more urgent queries, 111.

Contact

Telephone: 01274 221223