TheCOVID-19 crisis has forced many Americans to spend even more time than before in their homes. GHHI has met the unprecedented crisis of COVID-19 by expanding and innovating our services to mitigate the risks to the communities we serve and to continue to safely provide services to families in need. In the past few months, GHHI has safely delivered healthy homes kits, completed virtual home assessments, provided meals to families in our community, and conducted virtual health trainings for partners.
With the expertise gained from this new way of doing business, our team has built a Virtual Healthy Homes Toolkit for other organizations to use, free of charge, to adapt in-person healthy housing services to the virtual setting. This toolkit provides a wide variety of resources, including operational protocols, best practices, data management planning, and much more. We hope these tools will enable your organization to continue to safely and effectively serve your clients while creating healthier, more equitable communities.
Just as GHHI is constantly learning and growing, this toolkit will be a living resource, meaning that as we learn with and from you, updates and revisions will be made. We hope that you will provide as much feedback as possible to help us make this toolkit as meaningful as possible. If your organization is interested in more tailored assistance with implementing virtual healthy housing services beyond the scope of this toolkit, please know that we are here to help.
The Rapid Response-Virtual Home Visiting collaborative (RR-VHV) will provide best practice principles and strategies to support all home visiting professionals in maintaining meaningful connection with families during this time of increased anxiety and need.
Through collaboration, the RR-VHV will leverage the extensive resources and expertise that exists across home visiting organizations to support the development and distribution of cross-model, cross system approaches and guidance.
Every effort will be made to be as inclusive as possible. However, it is important to remember that no one individual or organization is expected to have expertise in every area. Please assess your own areas of strength and capacity to determine those areas in which you believe it is most important to be involved.
To maintain a rapid response framework, we recognize that perfection may not be possible. We will all do our best to get things right the first time and will graciously accept constructive suggestions for future improvement.
Thought leaders from across the field including National Model Alliance Member organizations, Association of State and Tribal Home Visiting Initiatives (ASTHVI), HV-ImpACT, HV-CoIIN, University of Southern California, Brazelton Touchpoints Center, etc.
This project is generously supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Pritzker Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and by the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs (AMCHP) as a part of a CARES Act award from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), grant number H7DMC37565. The contents are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the funding organizations.
Healthy Families America sites are responding to new challenges related to the current COVID-19 pandemic with resilience and are making families a priority despite barriers to services. Recognizing that families with young children still need support, sites and staff have adapted and are supporting families remotely, often through phone and video calls. As programs adapt, many are wondering about whether they are still truly doing home visiting at this time.
Typically, home visits occur in the home, last a minimum of an hour and the child is present. Extenuating circumstances may occur where visits take place outside the home, be of slightly shorter duration than an hour, or occur with the child not present. These may be counted as a home visit only if the overall goals of a home visit and some of the focus areas (listed below) have been addressed. Also, in very limited, special situations such as when severe weather, natural disaster or community safety advisory impedes the ability to conduct a home visit with a family, a virtual home visit, via phone (skype, FaceTime or other video technology preferred), can be counted when documented on a home visit record and the goals of a home visit are met including some of the focus areas (below).
As sites move forward with phone and video connections with families, they may find that it can be challenging to distinguish a remote home visit from other phone or video calls. It is possible to have a relatively brief call with a parent and address some of the focus areas above. Does that mean it was a home visit?
There are many similarities between a regular phone or video contact with a parent and a virtual home visit. Both are friendly and comfortable, both involve checking in on the well being of the family, both create opportunities for social connection. With so many similarities, home visitors and supervisors may be wondering how to make sure that what we are doing is home visiting.
Schedule it and call it a visit- Make sure the family knows your intention to make this a visit. Avoid unscheduled virtual visits when possible. Scheduling visits allows the FSS and the family to come to agreement about a time when the parent is likely to be available for an extended call and it sets some expectations about what the call will be about.
Be fully present- This can be challenging for HFA staff working from their homes and may require home visitors to be strategic about where they are in their own home during visits. While on the call or connecting through video, create space in the same way you would do in person: allow for quiet moments, notice feelings, attune to the parent. Be an active listener: when your mind wanders, use Mindful Self-Regulation to bring yourself back into connection with the family.
The predictability and comfort that a safe and healthy relationship with a Family Support Specialist offers to parents is more important than ever right now. HFA encourages sites to be creative and flexible in serving families with young children in these unprecedented and uncertain times, and we are grateful for the efforts of staff in sites in communities everywhere for the difference they are making in the lives of parents and young children.
While the project is conceptually strong and offers a wide range of well-developed renderings, it would greatly benefit from more consistent layout and information conveyed across the four sheets. The varied layouts make it challenging for a viewer to simply navigate. The sheets are also overwhelmingly dark in color. Rather than blackness the author might explore the positive effects of lighter colors and daylight. The texts would benefit from reduced length and larger font sizes. Nonetheless, the imagery is compelling and sophisticated.
The presentation assumes a clear and consistent layout that makes use of a primary image and a secondary detail or enlarged image within the same virtual space. The effect is like a magnifying glass, positively bringing clarity to the design intent. The accompanying texts, however, are rather long and winding, and could be improved through reduction and precision. The project simultaneously tackles many concepts and, while the presentation is ambitious and takes on many scales of thought, the author may consider distilling these ideas to yield a more powerful design statement.
The project offers some enticing visuals, but it suffers from overwhelming use of body text and lack of descriptive texts to clarify the images and diagrams. How has the form of this home been generated and how does this formal diagram relate to the development of the axonometrics, for instance? The author would benefit from greatly reducing the text, dividing it more evenly across the four sheets, while at the same time providing more specific annotation to clarify the concepts in each of the primary rendered images. Finally, while many of the images are individually powerful, there is little relationship among the layout of the four sheets, and a well-communicated project always benefits from general consistency.
Home Education: A parent-directed educational option that satisfies the requirement for regular school attendance. Parents have the freedom to determine their child's educational path and plan for reaching their goals. Students have the opportunity to explore and learn at their own pace, in any location or at any time.
Hospital Homebound Instructional Services: A temporary intervention not intended to replace the classroom experience. Services provided are limited when compared to a comprehensive campus. The primary goal is to minimize instructional gaps by providing access to the curriculum while the student is medically confined and to promote re-entry into a traditional setting.
Palm Beach Virtual School: A grade K-12 school option in Palm Beach County. Full-time and part-time options are offered to students. All full-time students work on a flexible schedule. Students are expected to meet course progression and weekly pace guidelines as well as participate in all district and statewide testing. All virtual courses are asynchronous.
Doctors at Augusta University Health are introducing innovative programs to provide quality care to as many patients as possible. One of those programs allows patients to have 24/7 care and reduces cost, all from the comfort of their own home.
Lauren Hopkins, AVP of Virtual Care & Community Engagement at AU Health, said the program started in February 2021, when beds in the hospital were virtually unavailable during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Virtual Care At Home program allows the AU Health Care team to discharge patients from the hospital earlier while continuing to provide around-the-clock monitoring of vital signs through remote monitoring. Patients will receive a daily virtual visit with an AU Health provider.
3a8082e126