Evaluation of Immunization Status of Contemporary Nurse-Family Partnership Clients

Background

The Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) is a national, evidence-based home visiting program currently serving over 30,000 first-time, low-income moms. The Guide to Community Preventive Services recognizes home visits as providing strong evidence for increasing vaccination rates.  This study provides updated data on immunization rates of a large cohort of Nurse-Family Partnership clients, and relates these figures to Healthy People 2020 goals.

Methods

Nurses completed forms at six month intervals after the birth of the client’s index child.  Data included whether the child’s immunizations were up-to-date based on their local immunization schedule, and whether this information was based on mother’s self-report or the nurse checking the written record.  We report the percentage of children up-to-date on immunizations based on the last records from a cohort of clients initially enrolled between 7/1/2007-6/30/2010, limiting to written record data. We then use logistic regression to identify predictors of immunization status within the NFP cohort.

Results

Immunizations were up-to-date for 90.0% (1789/1987), 91.4% (1514/1656), 91.8% (1259/1371), and 95.2% (2984/3133) of children of NFP clients at 6, 12, 18 and 24 months of age, respectively.  Immunization status was independent of race, education status or marital status of the clients.

Conclusions

 

Immunizations were up-to-date on 90% or more of the clients at each time period for Nurse-Family Partnership participants, indicating achievement of Healthy People 2020 levels. This updated data provides evidence that home visiting continues to be an effective intervention in achieving immunization targets, and may reduce health disparities between children of higher and lower-income mothers.