Inventory of Evidence-Based Practices (EBPs) for Healthy Start Programs
Evidence-based practices include actions, activities, strategies, or approaches that improve the health of women, before, during, and after pregnancy in order to improve birth outcomes and give infants up to age two years a healthy start. Also included in the collection are informational materials and tools that make it easier to implement evidence-based practices. To search by title, use the main search box located at the top of this page.
The Touchpoints approach offers healthcare providers and early education professionals a framework to build better partnerships with families around mutual strengths-based caregiving and parent engagement, all of which benefit child outcomes. Rooted in child social, emotional and behavioral development, Touchpoints seeks to improve parent-provider relationships, improve provider relationships with each other, enhance parent-infant relationships, moderate parental stress, normalize parent’s perceptions of their child’s behavior, increase well-child care adherence, improve infant developmental outcomes, improve maternal mental health indicators, and encourage longer breastfeeding. A variety of professional tools, training activities and learning communities are offered for providers.
Topics:
Breastfeeding Other Parenting Education Socio-emotional Development for Children
Approaches:
Promote Quality
Benchmarks:
Initiating Breastfeeding Sustaining Breastfeeding
Evidence Rating:
III. Expert guidelines—Protocols, standards of practice, or recommendations based on expert consensus.
Strengthening Families is a research-informed approach to increase family strengths, enhance child development and reduce the likelihood of child abuse and neglect. It is a systems development approach based on engaging families, programs and communities in building five protective factors: parental resilience, social connections, knowledge of parenting and child development, concrete support in times of need, social and emotional competence of children. Supported by helpful material that can be adopted and adapted for any program or service sector, including a program self-assessment to improve practice, an online data system, an online training curriculum, and the Strengthening Families national network.
Topics:
Other Parenting Education Socio-emotional Development for Children
Approaches:
Strengthen Family Resilience
Benchmarks:
Intimate Partner Violence Reading to Child Daily
Evidence Rating:
I. Evidence-based practices—have been rigorously evaluated and shown to be effective by MCH experts.
