We need both quantitative and qualitative data to prove the value of health visiting

Wilkinson’s article highlights the challenges of proving the value of health visiting.1 This is partly because of health visiting’s wide remit, which aims to improve child health through health promotion, parenting support, and screening and immunisation programmes.2 Another challenge is generating meaningful evidence about the impact of variation in the delivery of health visiting services across the UK.Publicly available aggregate data from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities are currently our best source of information on health visiting services, yet these are known to have data quality problems.34 They are limited in describing outcomes for children, and service variation for different subgroups of families (such as adolescent mothers or children with disabilities). The Community Services Data Set held by NHS Digital contains rich, individual level data on health visiting activity, which has the potential to transform what we know about the impact of health visiting. The completeness of this…
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