Health visitor support for families with Down's syndrome infants.

A health visitor was seconded to a university based research team studying intervention with families who have an infant with Down's syndrome. She was given a 3-week practical training and then provided a home-based service for 61 families, visiting every 6 weeks until 2 years of age. Infant development and parental satisfaction with the service were compared to previous findings of the research group. Parental satisfaction was found to be very high and the progress of the infants compared favourably to previous studies. Following this, two field health visitors were given the training and then provided a service in their local areas. The progress of the infants was monitored at 6-month intervals until 2 years of age, and parents were interviewed. Again no differences were found in the developmental progress of the infants and previous groups and parental satisfaction was high. The limitations of the training and some implications for practice were discussed.