Casebook: The Life and Times of a Health Visitor

Everyone experiences struggles and challenges at some point in life. In the UK, if you have children under five years of age, you have the opportunity of support from a highly trained health professional called a health visitor. This often-misunderstood postgraduate role involves helping families to improve their health while navigating the hurdles of life. The emotional mountain of daily struggles can seem overwhelming for young families. The health visiting service offers a metaphorical hand to hold alongside practical help and advice enabling parents to climb life’s occasionally difficult and often emotional mountains. To regard health as something that can be created, maintained, and improved is the mission of the health visiting service. Prevention of ill-health has always been seen as imperative. The health visitor encourages families towards this goal by offering support for their family health needs. Through case study this book offers insight into how the health visitor manages to create health and prevent ill-health with some surprising results. Managing the steppingstones to good health and avoiding the pitfalls of poor mental health can often seem impossible for new or even experienced parents. Accepting the helping hand of the health visiting service has the power to deliver a positive and quite profound effect. This book lifts the veil on the largely hidden work of this unsung, health professional. In this book you will find that the role of the health visitor is so much more complex than their famed job of ‘just weighing babies.’