Maternal health

Improving maternal health is a goal of some early childhood home visiting models in the HomVEE review. To achieve this goal, models provide mothers with health information and guidance during pregnancy and after the child’s birth. Some also link mothers to prenatal and postpartum health care providers. In addition, some programs link mothers to treatment facilities for mental health and substance issues, or may directly provide preventive mental health intervention or other services that promote their psychological wellbeing.

Maternal health involves both the mother’s health status (during or after pregnancy), including mental and behavioral health, stress, and health-related habits such as nutrition and sexual health, and measures of social support and other protective factors. Outcome measures in this domain include health care service receipt outcomes extracted from medical records, as well as standardized and unstandardized parent self-report measures. 

Maternal health involves the mother’s health status (during or after pregnancy), including mental and behavioral health, stress, and health-related habits such as nutrition and sexual health. Receipt of health services is in this domain; the mother’s health insurance status is in the family economic self-sufficiency domain.

Maternity leave. Measures of whether the mother takes paid maternity leave from work belong in this domain, and HomVEE generally characterizes taking this paid leave as favorable.

Social/emotional support to the mother belongs in this domain, whereas in-kind support that the primary caregiver received is in the family economic self-sufficiency domain. HomVEE characterizes more support as favorable. (The favorability of positive or negative findings in this area may be dependent on context or other factors. In some cases, the HomVEE team will confer with subject matter experts to make determinations about whether a finding is favorable, or unfavorable or ambiguous.)

Substance use. HomVEE generally characterizes more substance use as unfavorable. However, HomVEE may categorize the direction of impacts on indicators of any substance use (that do not specify the amount or frequency of substance use) as ambiguous.

The effects shown in the research are grouped into four categories: (1) favorable, (2) no effect, (3) unfavorable or ambiguous, and (4) not measured. Results for models that only have low-rated research are listed as “not applicable.” For more information on these categories please read the procedures and standards handbook. Only results from manuscripts that receive a moderate or high rating are considered below. This table includes manuscripts links to more information on the model’s effectiveness, implementation, and details on findings in this domain.

Effects shown in research — Maternal health domain