The importance of a service that sees all babies and young children in-person, as citizens in their own right, cannot be underestimated as they are invisible to other services unless their caregivers reach out. Seeing a baby or child interacting with their family in their home environment provides valuable insight into their world, as well as the risk and resilience factors that can impact on health and wellbeing.

Health visitors are a safety-critical health workforce - through health visitors’ vigilance, clinical skills and application of a breadth of knowledge of public health, they are trained to assess and support families in the community (across a breadth of needs including: physical and mental health for babies, children and their primary caregivers; child development; and safeguarding) in order to prevent and identify problems early. Practitioners also need the skills to interpret their findings in context and work with the family to determine the most appropriate course of action, including brokering their engagement. 
 
When babies, children or families with additional needs are identified, the intensity of support will be proportionate to the level of need and risk. Health visitors and their team members can provide additional targeted and specialist support directly (for example, for mild to moderate perinatal mental health problems, child development, or infant feeding issues) and also play an important role in connecting families to other specialist and community support services.

UNICEF UK described the universal role of the health visitor as “the backbone of early years services across the UK” and the “safety net’ around all families” (Unicef UK, 2022).

Health visiting in the UK is a devolved responsibility – see UK health visiting policy for details.

Infographics

These infographics have been co-produced by the iHV, with each UK nation and the Isle of Man, to support our aim to make the work of the health visitor more visible. They set out the breadth of the health visitor’s role: