Strengthened Home Visiting System
Fostering Equitable Access to High-quality Early Childhood Services
Evidence-based home visiting fosters seamless and equitable access to high-quality early childhood experiences and services from the prenatal-through-early-childhood-periods.
Through intentional investment and strategy, Illinois can offer robust home visiting and doula services that support expecting parents and those caring for young children to establish healthy foundations, leverage opportunities for children’s developmental and future successes and achieve their full potential.
How to Get There
- Increase home visiting and doula services to all eligible families in Illinois by improving the infrastructure to deliver services
- Increase state and federal funding to Illinois for prenatal and postpartum support through Medicaid reimbursement, Managed Care Organization administrative dollars and the Family First Prevention Services Act, and state budget line items
- Increase compensation of home visiting and doula professionals to improve retention and equity
- Support the recruitment and retention of a representative workforce that reflects the demographics of families in the community
- Increase access to preparatory education, professional development and job support for the postpartum workforce
- Unify data collection across systems and ensure data can be disaggregated by participant and workforce demographics (i.e., age, race, ethnicity)
- Increase communication to eligible families on the benefits and availability of intensive home visiting and doula services, which results in more families enrolled in services
- Streamline funding and monitoring processes across funders at the state level and create greater coherence in program quality
- Establish a Coordinated Intake (CI) process in all communities in which home visitors and doulas are available to ensure families can access services seamlessly and at the earliest point possible (CI workers are responsible for providing education on and recruiting and enrolling families in a community’s home visiting programs)
Increased access to
15,000 children &
their families
Projected Impact
- Increased access to evidence-based home visiting and doula services to 15,000 more children and their families
- Increased compensation of home visiting and doula professionals that improves recruitment and retention of workforce
- Better supported and more representative workforce that reflects the demographics of families in the community
- Easily navigable and accessible professional development and education opportunities and embedded job supports for home visiting and doula professionals
- Increased responsiveness of the field to family wants and needs through listening and engagement of families
- Improved quality of doula and home visiting services
- Increased awareness of the benefits of home visiting and doula services