Foundation Awards Nurse-Family Partnership $2.2 Million Grant

DENVER, CO (Oct. 8, 2012) - The Nurse-Family Partnership® (NFP) today announced that it is the recipient of a $2,226,000 grant from The JPB Foundation. The grant will be paid to the Nurse-Family Partnership National Service Office over two years to fund an innovative new state-of-the-art clinical tool for NFP nurses nationwide to use in home visits with young first-time mothers.

"We thank The JPB Foundation for its generous support of our program to change the lives of vulnerable young families," said Thomas R. Jenkins Jr., Nurse-Family Partnership President and CEO. "This funding will enable NFP nurses to be trained in using a new tool to more accurately assess young parents' skills in interacting with their baby, helping the mom or dad to be more competent and confident in their child rearing skills."

This grant provides funding for the NFP National Service Office to train every NFP nurse home visitor nationwide to properly use the newly developed and proprietary Dyadic Assessment of Naturalistic Caregiver-child Experiences (DANCE) tool. The JPB grant also funds clinical support in integrating DANCE into the nurses' ongoing practice.

The DANCE tool was developed by the Prevention Research Center at the University of Colorado Denver to specifically align with the Nurse-Family Partnership program. DANCE takes advantage of the NFP nurses' ability to view caregivers and children interacting in their natural environments at home, enabling a truer assessment of parent-child interactions.

The grant from The JPB Foundation will provide training in the DANCE tool to hundreds of nurse home visitors who deliver the Nurse-Family Partnership program to over 22,500 families in 42 states.

In the Nurse-Family Partnership program, registered nurses make home visits to low-income women who are having their first babies. The periodic nurse home visits continue from pregnancy until the child turns two. NFP nurses work with the young moms to achieve the main goals of a healthy pregnancy and delivery, improved child health and development through improved parenting skills, and economic self-sufficiency for the families, as the parents are helped to set goals for education and work.

About Nurse-Family Partnership
The Nurse-Family Partnership National Service Office is committed to producing enduring improvements in the health and well being of low-income, first-time parents and their children by helping communities implement and sustain an evidence-based public health program of home visiting by registered nurses. Nurse-Family Partnership is the most rigorously tested maternal and early childhood health program of its kind. Randomized, controlled trials conducted over 30 years demonstrate multi-generational outcomes that benefit society economically and reduce long-term social service expenditures. Nurse-Family Partnership is headquartered in Denver, Colorado.