Nurse Family Partnership
Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) is an intensive health visiting programme started in the US which has been proven to be highly effective at reducing abuse, neglect and many other adverse life outcomes.
After identifying NFP as our top recommended intervention in tackling the root causes of violence in 2001, we undertook a campaign to bring it to the UK. This included:
- Visiting the University of Colorado in 2004 and meeting David Olds, the person that set-up NFP, to win his support for extending NFP to the UK.
- Actively promoting testing of NFP in the UK, in the face of persistently low levels of public policy interest.
- Including NFP as our top recommendation for Government action in 2005 report ‘Violence and what to do about it’.
- Inviting David Olds to visit the UK and speak to senior policy makers about NFP in 2006.
- Making a presentation to the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit in 2006, recommending that NFP be piloted in the UK. This was the breakthrough we needed, meetings were arranged with David Olds and a decision was made to bring NFP to the UK.
In March 2007, 10 pilot sites were launched in the UK benefitting 1,000 families. In the UK this is known as Family Nurse Partnership.
In 2008 Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided to fund an extension of a further 20 pilot studies in England.
This has since been extended further and in 2010 it has been announced that funding has been secured to ensure that by 2015, 12,000 families will be benefitting from NFP.
