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Moving Beyond Program to Population Impact: Toward a Universal Early Childhood System of Care
Author(s) -
Goodman W. Benjamin,
O'Donnell Karen,
Murphy Robert A.,
Dodge Kenneth A.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of family theory and review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.454
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1756-2589
pISSN - 1756-2570
DOI - 10.1111/jftr.12302
Subject(s) - early childhood , early childhood intervention , intervention (counseling) , population , quality (philosophy) , health care , psychology , nursing , medicine , developmental psychology , economic growth , environmental health , philosophy , epistemology , economics
Families have clearly benefited from increased availability of evidence‐based intervention, including home‐visiting models and increased federal funding for programs benefiting parents and children. The goal of population‐level impact on the health and well‐being of infants and young children across entire communities, however, remains elusive. New approaches are needed to move beyond scaling of individual programs toward an integrated system of care in early childhood. To advance this goal, the current article provides a framework for developing an early childhood system of care that pairs a top‐down goal for the alignment of services with a bottom‐up goal of identifying and addressing needs of all families throughout early childhood. Further, we describe how universal newborn home visiting can be utilized to both support alignment of, and family entry into, an early childhood system of care with broad reach, high quality, and evidence of population impact for families and children.