Attachment 9 - Healthy Families America Best Practices Standards FINAL.pdf

Attachment 9 Healthy Families America Best Practice Standards*

Healthy Families New York follows the Healthy Families America Best Practice Standards:

1. Initiate services prenatally or at birth.

2. Use standardized screening and assessment tools to systematically identify and assess families most in need of services. These tools should assess the presence of various factors associated with increased risk for child maltreatment or other adverse childhood experiences.

3. Offer services voluntarily and use positive, persistent outreach efforts to build family trust.

4. Offer services intensely and over the long term, with well-defined criteria and a process for increasing or decreasing intensity of service.

5. Services take into account the culture of families such that staff understands, acknowledges and respects cultural differences of families; staff and materials used by the site reflect to the greatest extent possible the cultural, language, geographic, racial and ethnic diversity of the population served.

6. Services focus on supporting the parent(s) as well as the child by cultivating the growth of nurturing, responsive parent-child relationships and promoting healthy childhood growth and development.

7. At a minimum, all families are linked to a medical provider to assure optimal health and development. Depending on the family’s needs, they may also be linked to additional services related to finances, food, housing assistance, school readiness, child care, job training, family support, substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment and domestic violence resources.

8. Services are provided by staff in accordance with principles of ethical practice and with limited caseloads to ensure Family Support Specialists that have an adequate amount of time to spend with each family to meet their unique and varying needs and to plan for future activities.

9. Service providers are selected because of their personal characteristics, their willingness to work in or their experience working with culturally diverse communities, and their knowledge and skills to do the job.

10. Service providers receive intensive training specific to their role to understand the essential components of family assessment, home visiting and supervision.

11. Service providers have a framework, based on education or experience, for handling the variety of experiences they may encounter when working with at-risk families. All service providers should receive basic training in areas such as culture, reporting child abuse, determining the safety of the home, managing crisis situations, responding to mental health, substance abuse, or intimate partner violence issues, drug-exposed infants, and services in their community.

12. Service providers receive on-going, effective supervision so they are able to develop realistic and effective plans to empower families.

13. The site is governed and administered in accordance with principles of effective management and ethical practice.

* Effective through 12/2021. HFA Best Practice Standards, and the HFNY Policy Manual based on them, change periodically.