Casebook: The Life and Times of a Health Visitor

Everyone experiences struggles and challenges at some point in life. In the UK, if you have children under five years of age, you have the opportunity of support from a highly trained health professional called a health visitor. This often-misunderstood postgraduate role involves helping families to improve their health while navigating the hurdles of life.

The emotional mountain of daily struggles can seem overwhelming for young families. The health visiting service offers a metaphorical hand to hold alongside practical help and advice enabling parents to climb life’s occasionally difficult and often emotional mountains.

To regard health as something that can be created, maintained, and improved is the mission of the health visiting service. Prevention of ill-health has always been seen as imperative. The health visitor encourages families towards this goal by offering support for their family health needs. Through case study this book offers insight into how the health visitor manages to create health and prevent ill-health with some surprising results.

Managing the steppingstones to good health and avoiding the pitfalls of poor mental health can often seem impossible for new or even experienced parents. Accepting the helping hand of the health visiting service has the power to deliver a positive and quite profound effect. This book lifts the veil on the largely hidden work of this unsung, health professional. In this book you will find that the role of the health visitor is so much more complex than their famed job of ‘just weighing babies.’

Dr. A. M. Houston trained as a nurse and midwife and then focused on public health by training as a health visitor. Anna worked in the National Health Service in the UK for many years. Anna became interested in health research and left frontline practice to concentrate on research into community and family health. Anna completed her PhD at King’s College London.

Dr. Houston returned to front-line community service and developed a special interest in child development and child protection issues. Anna enjoyed developing practice, supporting students and most of all helping families with their pre-school children.

Throughout her practice in early years development, Anna passionately believed in the importance of reading to pre-school children as a valuable initial part of a child’s progress into education.

Customer Reviews

5.0

2 reviews

Clare Salter

What a brilliant read!! Much more than a read actually… so generously told. I will read again and again. It could be a pod cast. I can hear the stories as if being told in person which makes the book even better! It is a book of such experience and golden nuggets of wisdom to all readers. Absolutely fantastic. It would be brilliant if it could be added to student reading lists. Genius. It is packed again with my hand luggage to read another time on the plane.
Lindsay Cullen

This book is a compendium of case studies that demonstrate the depth and breadth of Health Visiting practice. It demonstrates the complexity of the Health visitor's role. It is written with professionalism but also interjected with humorous anecdotes making it a compelling read.
The history of the service is outlined by reference to the author's journey towards her career. The studies demonstrate compassion, commitment, and a belief in the Health Visitors' role in coming alongside the clients but also working professionally within the multidisciplinary team.
It is a frank account of community practice, the lives of individuals and families, and the challenges and difficulties they face.
This is not an academic text, however, the Case Studies identified could be easily utilized as exemplars for Students of Nursing, Midwifery, and Health Visiting in Enquiry-Based Learning. Footnotes and annotations identify reference sources. Health workers in the community setting could also draw on the material to support their decision-making in practice.

Write a Review

5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star

Your post will be reviewed and published soon. Multiple reviews on one book from the same IP address will be deleted.