Health Visiting

About our department

The Health Visiting Service works to keep your child and family healthy, and provide advice and support to parents and carers, from the later stages of pregnancy until you child reaches school age.

Our main areas of work are pre-school children, their carers and families. We promote health in the community by working with parents, carers and partner agencies to promote healthy lifestyles. 

We offer:

• Open Baby Clinics throughout the borough for parents and carers to access information and advice as well as baby weighing.  Please note that these clinics are currently by appointment only, until further notice.  Please contact your Health Visiting Team to arrange an appointment.
• Five Universal Health and Development Reviews: antenatal, at 28-37 weeks of pregnancy; new birth, when your baby is 10-14 days days old, and at 6-8 weeks, 9-12 months and 2 years, either in clinic or at home.
• Support and expert advice to all new parents, around all aspects of childcare and parenting, including infant feeding, immunisation, behaviour and parent-child relationships.
• Help with parental mental health issues including post -natal depression, contraception, smoking cessation and alcohol consumption. We also work with partner agencies to protect vulnerable children and families, with particular emphasis on early intervention
• Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND): The Health Visiting service has a vital role in working with parents to identify where a child may need extra support with their development.  We work with parents, early years education providers, children’s centres and therapists to help children get the best start in life.  We also work closely with the local authority and other agencies to provide the local offer. This is information and support in a single place for children and young people with special educational needs (SEND) and their parents or carers, about what services you can expect from a range of local agencies, including education, health and social care. Knowing what is out there gives you more choice and therefore more control over what support is right for each child and young person. You can find out more about information about this here.

We are a team of qualified nurses with an additional degree level health visiting qualification. We also have fully qualified staff nurses and nursery nurses. We are supported by healthy child programme assistants.