The Springfield-Greene County Health Department is gearing up to launch Family Connects, a program that provides newborn babies and mothers at-home visits from registered nurses.
The program aims to better connect families to helpful resources available to them in Springfield and Greene County.
Family Connects International takes an “evidence-based” approach with its at-home visitation program to reduce adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, which can contribute to “impaired decision-making, reduced impulse-control and maladaptive responses to stress,” which can can result in heightened rates of crime, substance abuse, unstable employment and sexual risk taking.
Greene County has the eighth highest rate of ACEs in Missouri. One of the best methods to lower the threat these adverse experiences pose is through early childhood home visitation programs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The health department plans to debut Family Connects across Greene County in January 2024, to “help build safe, stable, nurturing and supportive home environments” by providing health assessments to mothers and infants, substance abuse and mental health screenings, breastfeeding support, referral plans and other services.
“It gives us an opportunity to reach more women and children, to plug them into resources that they maybe didn’t even know that they needed,” Rinda Davis, the assistant director of health at the Springfield-Greene County Health Department, told the Greene County Commission at a Sept. 1 meeting.
Family Connects: What brought it to Greene County?
Family Connects International is a nonprofit organization that promotes a model of in-home clinical care to support maternal-child health in collaboration with community partners around the United States. The organization has programs in 20 states, including Missouri; Springfield is the the first program site in the state.
According to data compiled by the Health Department, Family Connects and similar programs have documented the following improvements:
- Mothers are 28-percent less likely to report clinical anxiety in the first six months after delivery;
- Infant emergency room visits were reduced by 37 percent through age 2;
- Child maltreatment investigations were reduced by 44 percent through age 2;
- 59-percent reduction in arrests among children;
- 72-percent reduction in convictions of mothers;
- 67-percent reduction in behavioral and intellectual problems among children at age 6.
Family Connects was initially identified as an evidenced-based model by the Mayor’s Commission for Children prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Davis. After several years of raising support for the program and holding meetings with the community, health care organizations and potential funders, the Springfield-Greene County Health Department began the early steps of bringing Family Connects to Greene County.
Family Connects is also listed among the strategies to combat priority health issues in the Health Living Alliance of the Ozarks’ Community Health Improvement Plan. The 2022 Community Health Needs Assessment found “vulnerability among children” related to health care access and social determinants of health.
However, the health department had to pause the program’s implementation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When looking to resume establishing Family Connects, the department determined it didn’t have the capacity to take on the program, and the Jordan Valley Community Health Center helped by taking the first steps and working through the initial phase of the project. In total, Family Connects has six phases: consultation, orientations, installation, implementation, certification and expansion.
“[Jordan Valley] worked through a lot of the pathway of initial training and just kind of what that looks like, with referral pathways from the hospital,” Davis told the Springfield Daily Citizen. “So they’ve done a lot of foundational work there and establishing a lot of those connections or referral pathways that then the nurses could connect families to.”
The health department is now taking on the program, but it will continue to work closely with Jordan Valley moving forward. In addition, the health department is working with other southwest Missouri health care organizations like CoxHealth and Mercy in order to identify new moms and their babies to see if they’re interested in enrolling in Family Connects. Enrollment is voluntary.
The health department will contact mothers after delivery and provide them with information about the program. If a mother is interested, a nurse will visit their home three weeks later, and make up to two additional visits. After those visits, another department staff member will reach out to determine the family’s needs and direct them to additional resources.
While the health department often focuses on higher-risk populations, Family Connects will be available to any new moms in Greene County, allowing for a greater range of reach.
In total, the Family Connects will address the six following areas:
- Community connections;
- Enhanced use of higher-quality child care;
- Higher-quality parenting behaviors;
- Enhanced home environments;
- Improved maternal mental health;
- Reduction of emergency department utilization.
While the other components stand to benefit families, the referral planning and resource connecting will provide a “lasting impact” across Springfield.
“This is really just a connection program,” Davis said.
Return-on-investment potentially significant
The implementation of the program, which the health department says yields “substantial quantifiable benefits,” comes at a six-figure cost.
It is estimated to cost about $1.4 million annually, and with $500,000 outstanding in the annual budget, the department hopes to launch Family Connects at the beginning of 2024. Startup funding includes American Rescue Plan Act dollars from the City of Springfield and Greene County, as well as the Children’s Trust Fund, the Musgrave Foundation and the Missouri Foundation for Health.
“It has more data systems and it has a little bit more than what we have currently,” Davis said. “So there’ll be more, plus, just having investment into the program, there’s licenses and fees and those kinds of things.”
The health department is also considering adding Family Connects to its list of legislative priorities, in hopes of finding a future funding source to continue the program in Greene County.
Reaching out to families where they’re at and connecting them to resources that address areas from housing to food to health care can result in monetary savings by the government as well as benefit the family and child — from infancy to adulthood — according to Davis.
The return-on-investment of the program is estimated to be between 125 percent and 570 percent, depending on the risk level of the family, according to data provided by the health department.
“There’s no better investment than moms and babies in creating long-term public health and long-term community health,” Springfield-Greene County Health Department director Katie Towns said at the Sept. 1 meeting.
Davis said Family Connects takes an upstream approach that can set up children to thrive in adulthood.
“We’ve got things in place of reaching kids later and trying to solve and connect people later on, but this is really getting at that early phase of setting a child on the right path and helping parents to have the resources and the connections that they need to do the job of parenting,” Davis said.
As the program rolls out and they begin evaluating progress, the health department will showcase results and provide updates to various stakeholders in the community.
