Building state and local networks and innovative funding strategies to support child care health consultants

Arizona has piloted a coordinated system for child care health consultant (CCHC) services in one large urban county (Pima) for many years. Four nurse consultants, based in a local health department, and two-grant-funded staff serve on average 200 child care providers annually with services ranging from training and technical assistance on best practices for a healthy child care environments and practices to responses for managing disease outbreaks in child care centers. Recognizing the need to provide funders and other decision-makers with data about the number and types of services the CCHC program delivers and the impact of their work, the Pima County CCHC program introduced a comprehensive electronic CCHC services tracking system in 2005. Analysis of the tracking data provided evidence that 91% of centers made improvements in health and safety as a result of consultation services. Armed with the Pima County usage and impact data, Arizona CCHC advocates persuaded the Arizona Early Childhood Development and Health Board, also known as First Things First, to expand the CCHC program statewide through the state's new early childhood Quality First initiative. The purpose of this presentation is to both describe the effectiveness of CCHC services in Arizona and to demonstrate how one pilot public health initiative expanded the scope and reach of its services through the effective use of data and partnering with the early childhood education community. The Arizona experience provides a model for marketing an effective intervention that has implications for a broad array of pilot public health initiatives.