A three year, $10 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation will allow the Children's Hospital Association of Denver to expand its nurse home-visiting program to assist first-time, low-income mothers with newborns.

The grant will establish a national program center at the University of Colorado to train new nurses over the next three years. The national center will support a network of visiting-nurse programs in 40 communities nationwide.

In addition, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant will fund a regional center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's schools of Public Health and Medicine.

Expectant and new mothers in the program get regular visits from nurses during pregnancy and the first two years of the child's life. The nurses help the women build parenting skills and teach them child health and development.

David Olds, Ph.D., professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and preventative medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, will head up the program.

Since 1979, Olds has been studying and refining nurse home-visit programs and the effect they have on families. Researchers claim these programs have reduced the number of its participants who smoke during pregnancy, resulted in fewer premature deliveries, and reduced the number of future adolescent pregnancy.

Children in such programs have enhanced social, cognitive and language skills, and they endure fewer instances of child abuse or neglect, the foundation reports.

The Princeton, N.J-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is devoted exclusively to health and health care. It focuses grants on three goal areas: assuring that all Americans have access to basic health care at reasonable costs, improving care and support for people with chronic health conditions, and reducing the personal social and economic harm caused by substance abuse.

Full text of the article is currently found at:
http://www.rwjf.org/media/10-04-99.htm