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Prenatal Care for the Homeless
Families and children in the context of social change
The Homeless Prenatal Program
The goal of the Homeless Prenatal Program (HPP) in San Francisco is to break the cycle of childhood poverty by providing a variety of services to homeless families (Homeless Prenatal Program, 2010). The original and still primary service offered is prenatal and parenting support, in addition to housing assistance, training in personal finance and computer skills, mental health services and referrals, financial emergency assistance, and substance abuse counseling. The historical goal has been to reach out to homeless women who have become pregnant or are the head of a family and provide the relevant services and referrals to stabilize and improve their situations and thus ensure continuity of perinatal care. The prenatal care consists of on-site care and classes in prenatal self-care. Perinatal care services include home visits to help mothers provide for the infant's needs, infant wellness evaluations, and motivational support.
An important program developed within HPP was the community health worker training program, which provides homeless women employment opportunities after...
Some of these women have been hired by HPP, thereby providing HPP with the skills and knowledge necessary to go out into the streets and shelters, and find the women and families who need their services (Diehl, 2004, p. 7-8). These former clients-turned-health workers also gave HPP the necessary insight for forming trusting relationships with homeless women that would otherwise avoid government programs.
Measures of Success
Several measures are used to assess the effectiveness of prenatal care and the primary ones are birth weight and pre-term birth rates. For example, when a sample of women who had given birth while homeless were surveyed in the Los Angeles area, it was found that babies born to these women were almost three times more likely to have a low birth rate and almost twice as likely to be born pre-term, when compared to national norms (Stein, Lu, and Gelberg, 2000). Some of the main contributing factors identified in the study were substance abuse, ethnicity, income, and severity of their homelessness experience (during 1st trimester, and lifetime duration and frequency). A survey of homeless women who had given birth in Northwest Florida revealed almost 40% had used…
References
Bloom, Kathaleen, C., Bednarzyk, Michele S., Devitt, Deanna L., Renault, Rebecca A., Teaman, Veronica, and Van Loock, Donna M. (2004). Barriers to prenatal care for homeless pregnant women. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing, 33, 428-435.
Diehl, Digby. (2004). The Homeless Prenatal Program. In S.L. Isaacs and J.R. Knickman (Eds.) To Improve Health and Health Care, Volume VII. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Homeless Prenatal Program. (2010). Retrieved July 12, 2011 from http://www.homelessprenatal.org/
Matti, Linda K. And Caspersen, Virginia M. (1993). Prevalence of drug use among pregnant women in a rural area. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing, 22, 510-514.
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