Reflection on a Visit to a Maternal and Child Health Nurse

This report reflects on a student's experience visiting a maternal and child health nurse. The student discusses the nurse's role in providing support and guidance on various topics, including child health, development, and parenting. The reflection highlights the importance of regular health check-ups, breastfeeding, immunizations, and emotional support. The student also examines the social model of health practiced by the nurse, the impact of cultural background and health literacy on accessing healthcare services, and the positive impact of the nurse's advice and support, including assistance during emergencies. The report emphasizes the effectiveness of maternal and child health services in promoting the well-being of both mothers and children, and the value of accessible healthcare services.

Healthcare

Reflection on visiting a maternal and child health nurse
It is true that arrival of new baby brings several differences in the life of a person by bringing
new joys as well as some challenges. Before providing any type of service, she asked me few
things such as educational status, women’s autonomy, religion, and birth order, as well as
accessibility factors (Duffee et al, 2017). This information was considered important as the
healthcare centre communicate accordingly. They also conducted the necessary physical
health check-up in order to known the health status of me. I as a mother visited a maternal
and child health nurse for consulting her regarding my health conditions and precautions that
I have to make after pregnancy. My child health nurse proved to be great source of support.
Child health nurse was registered nurse with her qualification in family and child health
nursing. Before going for the consultation, I took the appointment in order to get the best
service. She suggested me several things such as regular health check-ups for the baby to
assess the growth and development. Before this check-up, I was not known with the
importance of regular health check-up. She also told me to keep the extra care when it comes
to getting baby to sleep, breastfeeding, immunisation, and support if I feel emotional or
anxious, supporting the referral for postnatal depression or anxiety, as well as washing the
baby (Sandner, Cornelissen, Jungmann and Herrmann, 2018).
Social model of health is said to be the conceptual framework that should be practised by
different individuals. Biomedical model of health is practised only health and doctors
professionals. As compare to this, social model of health includes the preventive measures
and biomedical medical includes inly diagnosis, treatment, and cure of disease. The maternal
and child health care however includes the social model of health.
After this, the team has designed three modules by targeting specific areas. Firstly, they had
given emphasis on creating less chaos at home by helping me with the children’s eating and
sleeping. The second area was related to supporting my own emotional interaction with the
child. The third area was home learning environment in which they taught to support the
parents by introducing the regular education play, reading, as well as some other learning
activities at home (Susanto, 2018).
My experience at maternal and child health nurse was positive and helping. She gave me the
necessary information regarding advice and support related to different topics such as child
health, development and learning, parenting, family wellbeing and health, safety as well as

nutrition planning. She also suggested me to organise the parents group where I can get
information. I personally believe that it would be great if I get the chance to meet other
parents. She provided me the “green book” which covers the full information of my baby and
mine. Every time I see the child and maternal health nurse, she used to fill the sections related
to growth and development of child (Monsen et al, 2017).
During my maternity and child health care, cultural background was seen as the social
determinant. Due to different country cultural background, I was not known to the best child
health care provider. Those cause the hindrance in getting the best childcare services.
However, my friends living in Australia helped me in great way to find out the best child
health care provider. She told me to discuss the issues such as walking, crawling, toilet
training, tantrums, play and speech. The most significant advantage of the visit was that
families could also access the service at any time through the centre visit. It typically operates
through the open consultation session, schedules appointments or after some hours of
appointment (Williams et al, 2017). In addition to this, health literacy is also considered to be
the major social determinant at the time of check-up. Due to not proper health literacy, I
however faced the issues in understanding some of the measures discussed by doctor. The
advice given by doctors were based on tertiary prevention that helped me in improving my as
well as child’s life.
I still remember the time when I was not able to visit the health care centre. The nurse has
given me extra support by helping me on phone. My child did not slept whole night due to
which I was too worried. However, I called in the centre early morning but one staff of that
centre supported me well. She has given me the possible solutions that they can give on
phone. My interaction during this time was too helping and they assisted me every well even
though I did not took the appointment earlier. I personally believe that these types of
assistance should be there in case of emergency. I applied those solutions and it helped me in
solving that concern. I felt too delighted that I always took the service from this centre (Olds,
2016).
From the above discussion, I can say that maternal and child health service through visit
proves to be effective for a mother to take care of his child and her. She told me to take the
appointment every week in order to keep the child and my own safety.

References
Duffee, J.H., Mendelsohn, A.L., Kuo, A.A., Legano, L.A., Earls, M.F. and Committee on
Child Abuse and Neglect, 2017. Early childhood home visiting. Pediatrics, 140(3),
p.e20172150.
Monsen, K.A., Brandt, J.K., Brueshoff, B.L., Chi, C.L., Mathiason, M.A., Swenson, S.M. and
Thorson, D.R., 2017. Social determinants and health disparities associated with outcomes of
women of childbearing age who receive public health nurse home visiting services. Journal
of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing, 46(2), pp.292-303.
Olds, D., 2016. Building evidence to improve maternal and child health. The
Lancet, 387(10014), pp.105-107.
Sandner, M., Cornelissen, T., Jungmann, T. and Herrmann, P., 2018. Evaluating the effects of
a targeted home visiting program on maternal and child health outcomes. Journal of health
economics, 58, pp.269-283.
Susanto, T., 2018. Public health nurse services for maternal-child immigrant healthcare: A
literature review. Central European Journal of Nursing and Midwifery, 9(3), pp.873-879.
Williams, C.M., Cprek, S., Asaolu, I., English, B., Jewell, T., Smith, K. and Robl, J., 2017.
Kentucky health access nurturing development services home visiting program improves
maternal and child health. Maternal and child health journal, 21(5), pp.1166-1174.