The ASST Valle Olona has completed the Home Visiting offerincluded within the process of assistance and territorial care of women who give birth at the company’s birth centers.
The project, which includes home visits, aims to offer continuity of care between the hospital and the local area, within the birth process; timely support where a family’s natural place is, a privileged point of approach, observation, prevention and treatment.
The phase taken care of with Home Visiting is that of the puerperium (period which includes the moment immediately after giving birth and the following six weeks approximately) is a time space characterized by strong emotions, capable of influencing numerous physiological aspects of the woman, as well as subjecting the mother-child dyad to conditions of stress and upheavals inevitable.
The midwife, an integral part of a multi-professional group, actively participates in the drafting of an integrated and shared home follow-up plan for mother and newborn in the days following discharge from hospital.
The hospital midwives carry out an informative interview with the mother, so as to offer and present the home visit. In the event that the new mother agrees to be followed at her home, you are given an information brochure on which the date of the first visit to your home is already identified. Subsequently, the mother is contacted by the local midwives to reconfirm the appointment is guaranteed within 24-72 hours of hospital discharge.
Following the first home meeting, it is scheduled a further appointment for a home visit, or to be taken care of at the Family Counseling Centre. Where problems are highlighted that cannot be treated at the new mother’s home, the Family and Community Midwife will make direct contact with the relevant Obstetric-Gynecological Emergency Department, for the management of the specific case.
«Through the Home Visiting activity, new mothers will be able to have a privileged observatory, in order to monitor their own well-being, that of the newborn and, no less importantly, the family well-being – underlines the Dr. John Tremamondo, Social Health Director of ASST Valle Olona – Home visits will be useful for identify the signs early postpartum depression and the Baby Blues. But not only. They will also make it possible to detect any situations of parenting at psycho-social risk, so as to promptly activate specific support and care paths at the Family Consultations, encouraging the long-term care of mothers who have recently given birth by multidisciplinary teams (family midwife, assistant social worker, pediatric nurse, health assistant, psychologist)”.
