Health visitors work in primary health care especially in prevention, health promotion and education, public health and hygiene.

The areas of their activities are homes of families, schools, hospitals, community settings and consulting centres. Out of 5300 health visitors more than 4005 are district health visitors and 1007 school health visitors status. Professional inspection has been provided by the Office of Chief Medical Officer (OCMO).

The Hungarian health visitor network and its operation is unique. Health visitor accompanies the child (and the family) from birth until the end of compulsory education. In the disadvantaged areas, district health visitors and school health visitors are often manage their daily duties alone without any professional guidance or support. It concerns particularly those health visitors carrying prevention within marginalized neighborhoods, Roma settlements. Beyond visiting families they do the necessary administration, in most cases they commute to the consulting centers every working day, where the one and only computer is available and that in turn is used by several health visitors.

The OCMO has long experience in designing and implementing EU funded flagship projects. In the last three years the Office was the project leader in the project focused on competency raising of health visitors, and participated in methodological and IT development.

The goal of the recent project is to support health visitors with IT tools where needed all over the country and at the same time to provide support through a contact centre on a professional and IT knowledge base.

The other goal of the project is to contribute to the special prevention and health education task of the health visitors, especially among the disadvantaged families and in Roma communities. In the project we make educational material with drawings and pictographs which can be used by the health visitors when visiting illiterate women. In the framework of Roma inclusion panel we launch a competition for collecting good practices on cooperation among the local actors in disadvantaged communities. Partnerships will be facilitated by the local community developers.

This programme will take place in three counties (Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, Heves). We select a disadvantaged settlement, where a local community health club will be organized as a pilot programme in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county. Different professionals will be involved and their cooperation will be facilitated by the local health visitor. In the same county, a survey will be pursued on health consciusness of Roma women. We would like to get clear picture about the motivation why they don’t participate in public health screening programmes. We organize supervision activities for the health visitors working in those 3 counties to support the development of professional personality of health visitors, to give them guidance and to reduce their stress load by using the methods of individual and group supervision and case discussion.

As helping professionals, the main equipment in their work is their own personality. In helping professions, professionals without adequate personality support may be vulnerable to the risk of burnout. As a result of burnout, health visitors’ willingness of taking challenges may diminish; they may change their career, or struggle with psychosomatic diseases. The cervical screening, as a new competence, is another challenge for health visitors: practicing an intimate examination was not part of their work previously, thus this raises many questions and difficulties. These issues should be discussed and examined and this new competence should be strengthened and improved by a practical training.

We will inform the public about the project events and results frequently on the project’s website. At the beginning we organize opening conference in Miskolc. On the closing conference there will be presentations about the achivements, as well as the winners of the good practice competition will get the chance to present the best cooperation practices on health issues. The project has been designed with sustainability being always kept in mind. The education materials and the good practices will be uploded on the website. The methodology of the local health club will be put on the website and the results will be presented. Supervision will be taken by the two universities and will be introduced into their graduate trainings. The results of the survey may be used in the future by health policy decision makers in designing national public health programmes and in making of nationwide public health screening strategies. Notebooks distributed in the project to health visitors are to be appropriate for supplying data for several years. The contact centre to be established in the project will be sustained and supervised by the OCMO during the maintanance period.

The project is implemented with the support of the Norwegian Financial Mechanism.

Implementation period: 1/May/2016 - 30/April/2017
The amount of aid: 794.648.900 Ft
Projekt leader: Office of Chief Medical Officer
1097 Budapes, Albert Flórián street 2-6.
Telephone number: 06-1-476-1100