Local Evaluator SIHF Healthy Start East St. Louis, Illinois, United States
Full Description: Background. Since 2019, MCHB’s Division of Healthy Start and Perinatal Services has required all 101 Healthy Start programs in the U.S. to serve fathers, reflecting a significant new federal commitment to male involvement. Objective. Using qualitative methods, the objective of the current study was to explore and describe the early development of father involvement at East St. Louis Healthy Start, with a focus on approaches to recruiting and maintaining fathers’ participation. Methods. In June 2020, two focus groups were conducted with ten Healthy Start case managers. From June to December 2020, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten recently enrolled Healthy Start fathers. Both were audio recorded and transcribed. Analysis. Content analyses of the transcripts were conducted using NVIVO software. Four-hundred sixty-two text segments were linked to 138 primary, secondary and tertiary themes. Results. Primary themes included sources of father referral, recruitment messages, reasons for participation, barriers to participation, historical male exclusion from MCH programs, program critical mass, and use of communication channels to promote the new father involvement initiative, including social media, newspapers, billboards, radio, barbershops, and peer-to-peer community outreach. For the barriers to participation primary theme, secondary themes encompassed more than two dozen barriers, including male mistrust of health care, paternity denial, belief that fathering is not an acquired skill, male autonomy, confidentiality, fathers viewed only as financial providers, conflicts with work and school schedules, suspicion that the program benefits program staff more than it benefits fathers, intimate partner violence, male parenting unwanted by mother, and mother estrangement from father. In addition to previewing details about father program activities, recruitment messages employed to encourage fathers to enroll emphasized that the Healthy Start father program: (1) seeks to involve the whole family, (2) is staffed by a male lead, (3) will support you in what you’re already doing as a father, and (4) seeks to build a community and culture that values fathers. This poster will contain an infographic displaying every theme as well as illustrative text segments for a dozen of the most significant themes. Conclusion. Barriers to recruiting fathers into Healthy Start are many and significant, but over time recruitment efforts have borne success. Case manager referral, referral from Healthy Start classes, and a male peer-to-peer approach have been the primary recruitment channels. In East St. Louis, growth in father participation has increased, with about 50 fathers currently enrolled, many for a year or more.
Abbreviated Description: Since 2019, MCHB’s Division of Healthy Start and Perinatal Services has required all 101 Healthy Start programs in the U.S. to serve fathers, reflecting a significant new federal commitment to male involvement. Focus groups and open-ended interviews were conducted with case managers and recently enrolled fathers. Content analyses of transcripts produced 462 text segments linked to 138 primary, secondary and tertiary themes. Themes included barriers to enrollment, historical male exclusion from MCH programs, and use of communication channels to promote the new father involvement initiative, such as social media and peer-to-peer community outreach. This poster will contain an infographic displaying every theme as well as illustrative text segments for a dozen of the most significant themes.
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