Child Care Health Consultation and Promoting Mental Health

The National Training Institute for Child Care Health Consultants (NTI) is the national resource for training child care health consultant trainers. Established in 1997, NTI has developed and implemented a state-of-the-art train-the-trainer program based on Caring for Our Children: National Health and Safety Performance Standards. Guidelines for Out-of-Home Child Care Programs. The NTI program ensures that qualified professionals are available to train child care health consultants, who in turn provide health and safety assessment and guidance to child care settings. NTI recruits state and regional level public health and early childhood education professionals with experience in training and child care and trains them using an approach that combines on-site training with distance learning.

The NTI curriculum contains 15 Modules. Each Module includes the latest research and resources on the selected child care topics. Using the NTI curriculum, program graduates in turn train health professionals to consult with child care programs. One topic covered is supporting social-emotional development in children, families and staff. Child care health consultants learn characteristics of healthy families and strong caregiver-child relationships, how to create healthy environments, recognize behavioral difficulties and respond to them, and what resources are available for referral. Child care health consultants are in a unique position to assist child care providers in promoting healthy development, providing information and training, assisting with prevention of problems, and connecting with local resources.

This part of the panel presentation is the foundational piece for explaining in more depth how child care health consultants promote healthy development.