Company Profile
Nurse-Family Partnership
Company Overview
Beginning with trust, ending with extraordinary outcomes.
Nurse-Family Partnership® is a community health program that truly changes lives – for generations to come.
Nurse-Family Partnership helps transform the lives of vulnerable first-time moms and their babies. Through ongoing home visits from registered nurses, low-income, first-time moms receive the care and support they need to have a healthy pregnancy, provide responsible and competent care for their children, and become more economically self-sufficient. From pregnancy until the child turns two years old, Nurse-Family Partnership Nurse Home Visitors form a much-needed, trusting relationship with the first-time moms, instilling confidence and empowering them to achieve a better life for their children – and themselves.
An evidence-based community health program, Nurse-Family Partnership's outcomes include long-term family improvements in health, education, and economic self-sufficiency. By helping to break the cycle of poverty, we play an important role in helping to improve the lives of society's most vulnerable members, build stronger communities, and leave a positive impact on this and future generations.
Company History
Nurse-Family Partnership is founded on the pioneering work of David Olds, professor of pediatrics, psychiatry, and preventive medicine at the University of Colorado Denver. While working in an inner-city day care center in the early 1970s, Olds was struck by the endemic risks and difficulties in the lives of low-income children. He realized the children needed help much earlier—at home, with their mothers, when they were infants, and even before they were born. Olds' determination to help young children and families get a better start in life led to the development of a nurse home visitation program for first-time, low-income moms and their children.
Over the next 37 years, he tested the program in randomized controlled trials with three different populations: Elmira, New York, in 1977; Memphis, Tennessee, in 1988; and Denver, Colorado, in 1994. Results showed that the program improved pregnancy outcomes, improved the health and development of children, and helped parents create a positive life course for themselves.
By 1996, Dr. Olds was satisfied that NFP was ready for dissemination to local communities. Two locations began replication that year - Dayton, Ohio was the first, and several counties in Wyoming began shortly thereafter. Six additional locations (Los Angeles, Fresno, and Oakland, CA, Clearwater, FL, St. Louis, MO, and Oklahoma City, OK) were funded in 1996 by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
The Nurse-Family Partnership National Service Office, a national non-profit, was established in 2003 to facilitate quality replication of the Nurse-Family Partnership program across the U.S. and to provide implementing agencies with ongoing support in nursing education and practice, program quality assurance, marketing, public policy, and more.
Today, Olds and his team at the Prevention Research Center for Family and Child Health at the University of Colorado Denver continue to study the model's long-term effects and lead research to improve the Nurse-Family Partnership program model.