PLENARY SESSION I, STRENGTHENING THE LINKS BETWEEN POLICY, PRACTICE, AND SCIENCE: REFLECTIONS ON EARLY HOME VISITING

One of the overriding missions of the Society for Prevention Research is to strengthen the link between preventive intervention research, policy, and practice. This symposium will examine the link between research on early home visiting and federal and state policies in addressing the needs of vulnerable children and families.

The first speaker will be David Olds, who has conducted a series of randomized controlled trials of the Nurse Family Partnership, a program of prenatal, infant, and toddler home visiting by nurses for low income mothers bearing first children.  Original trials of the program found important impacts on maternal and child health for many years after the end of the program at child age 2.  Evidence from the NFP trials served as a significant evidentiary foundation for the Maternal Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program funded through the federal government.  Olds also launched a non-profit devoted to replicating the NFP in the US and has led an effort to support replication of the program in international contexts.  He will discuss his experience in strengthening the link between research, policy, and practice.

The second speaker will be Dr. Darcy Lowell, who has led a program of research to develop and test a program of home visiting for highly vulnerable families known as Child First.   Lowell’s program is an innovative, home-based early childhood intervention embedded in a system of care that works to decrease the incidence of serious emotional disturbance, developmental and learning problems, and abuse and neglect among extremely vulnerable young children (prenatal through age five years) and families.  The program has been evaluated in a randomized clinical trial and found to produce important effects on children’s mental health, language development, maternal mental health, and family involvement with child protective services.  Child First has been replicated throughout Connecticut, and has recently begun national replication. Dr. Lowell will discuss the results of the original trial and her team’s experience in replicating the program in new community settings.

The third speaker will be Ron Haskins, Co-Director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution and co-author of “Show Me the Evidence: Obama’s Fight for Rigor and Results In Social Policy.”  Dr. Haskins will discuss his work on strengthening the link between evidence and policy, with a particular focus on the Maternal, Infant, And Early Childhood Home Visiting Program funded by the federal government.  Haskins will discuss the potential of evidence-based policy making to reduce poverty and increase economic opportunity for the disadvantaged and what it will take to create the conditions needed to bring policy and practice into closer alignment with high quality evidence.