Community of practice for health visitors

The aim of this project is to develop and implement a virtual community of practice for health visitors across two NHS trusts in England.

Empowerment of health visitors is achieved through a process of enabling them to increase control over and improve their practice. We propose to support the work of the developing health visitor workforce through a virtual community of practice for health visitors (CoP-HV).

The CoP-HV will be piloted in two NHS trusts using a platform developed by the Open University (The Evidence Hub). This will enable health visitors to share, manage and co-produce knowledge in a virtual space that has not been previously available to them. The CoP-HV will provide evidence and practice digests and an e-bulletin.

To ensure family priorities are met, we will involve parents via the Netmums website in the development of the CoP-HV. We anticipate that the CoP-HV will contribute to professional learning, debate and discursive practice and ultimately to enhancement of practice. We will evaluate both the process and the outcomes of the CoP-HV through an independent evaluation.

Empower-HV: A virtual community of practice for health visitors - Sally Kendall, Fiona Brooks and Faith Ikioda in partnership with the Institute of Health Visiting.

Collaborators: Cheryll Adams, Ros Bryar, Sarah Cowley, Institute of Health Visiting, Fiona Brooks, UH, Peter Scott, Open University, Hertfordshire Community Trust, Barts and the London NHS Trust, NetMums.