Specialist home-visiting

BUILDING BLOCKS: 2-6 STUDY

Chief Investigator: Prof. Mike Robling

Evaluating the medium-term effectiveness, and the cost and consequences of the Family Nurse Partnership parenting support programme in reducing maltreatment in young children.

This study was designed to evaluate the medium-term effectiveness of the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) programme. The FNP programme aims to support teenagers expecting their first child and has been shown to reduce child abuse and neglect in the longer term in US studies. There has previously been one evaluation of the FNP programme in England - The Building Blocks Trial, but this only looked at the short term effectiveness, this followed mothers and their children until the child’s second birthday. This study has followed the same mothers and their children for a further five years until the child is 7 years old.

This study has used routine data to follow up mothers and children and has accessed the medical, education and social care records of the mothers and their children. All mothers were given the opportunity to opt-out of this study.

Building Blocks: 2-6

BB:2-6 Study Results

Final Report

The NIHR report has been published and is available via this link.

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Lay Summary

Download the summary of our results here.

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Main Paper

The main results have been published - available here:

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KEy messages from this study

Members of the public were involved in the study in various ways. The main involvement came come from three groups:

CASCADE Voices are a group of care-experienced young people,
The ‘Our Place’ group is a network of young parents with young children,
ALPHA are a group of young people who advise researchers organised by Cardiff University

These three groups represent broadly the participants who took part in the study, for example they are similar in age. These groups advised on a broad range of topics from study design to dissemination of the results. There is also an independent lay representative on the study steering committee (SSC).

Key outputs from these activities:

Input on the letters that were sent out to participants about this study
Animations about what routine data is and how it can be used for research - see "getting animated" project

Highlighting the key concerns and benefits of using routine data for public health research

Publications

Lugg-Widger F, Cannings-John R, Channon S, Fitzsimmons D, Hood K, Jones KH, Kemp A, Kenkre J, Longo M, McEwan K, Moody G, Owen-Jones E, Sanders J, Segrott J, Robling M. Assessing the medium-term impact of a home-visiting programme on child maltreatment in England: protocol for a routine data linkage study. BMJ Open 2017;7:e015728. Available here.
Lugg-Widger F, Cannings-John R, Angel L, Moody G, Segrott J, Kenkre J, Robling M. Assessing the impact of specialist home visiting upon maltreatment in England: a feasibility study of data linkage from a public health trial to routine health and social care data. Pilot Feasibility Stud 2018;4:98. Available here.
Lugg-Widger FV, Angel L, Cannings-John R, Hood K, Hughes K, Moody G, Robling M. Challenges in accessing routinely collected data from multiple providers in the UK for primary studies: managing the morass. International Journal of Population Data Science, 2018;3:2. Available here.
Robling M, Lugg-Widger FV, Cannings-John R, Angel L, Channon S, Fitzsimmons D, Hood K, Kenkre J, Moody G, Owen-Jones E, Pockett R, Sanders J, Segrott J, Slater T. Nurse-led home-visitation programme for first-time mothers in reducing maltreatment and improving child health and development (BB:2-6): longer-term outcomes from a randomised cohort using data linkage. BMJ Open 2022;12:e049960. Available here.