The Colorado Adolescent Maternity Program (CAMP) is a prenatal, delivery and postnatal care program.
It combines clinic appointments and home visits. It integrates the support of various health care providers, including obstetrician, paediatrician, social worker, and dietician.
The program aims to:
CAMP was designed for adolescent mothers at risk of maltreating their children.
The Colorado Adolescent Maternity Program has only been evaluated in the USA (Stevens-Simon et al. 2001). A randomised control trial was conducted with 145 people (58 in the intervention group and 87 in the control group). It has only been evaluated with mothers who attended the CAMP clinic. Mothers were 13-19 years old (average age = 17.5). Most of the mothers were White (49%), Black (28%) and Hispanic (20%) and from low-income families.
The program has not been evaluated in Australia or with Aboriginal Australians.
Overall, the program had a mixed effect on client outcomes.
Mixed research evidence (with no adverse effects)
The Colorado Adolescent Maternity program has two key components: Clinic appointments and home visits.
The home visitation component of the program was designed to supplement the care provided in the clinic.
Clinic appointments are conducted monthly for the first 6 months, every other month for 6 months, then at 3-month intervals until the child is 2 years old.
Home visits are conducted weekly for the first 16 postpartum weeks. The visits typically last 1-2 hours. After the first 16 weeks, the frequency of these visits is reduced depending on the needs of the family. However, they are never more than 6 weeks apart. Visits are also supplemented with telephone calls to ensure families are contacted at least twice a month.
The home visitor serves as a link between the clinic staff, the teenage parent and her family and any necessary social and mental health service providers. The home visitor works with the teenage parents and their families to develop individualised programs. These programs seek to address the specific behaviours and attitudes that put them at increased risk for maltreating their children. Each visit includes extensive counselling, pre-emptive guidance and medical, educational, and social service referrals as needed.
The home visitor draws on their own experience as a mother, and a parenting curriculum created by the CAMP staff to ensure that all teenage parents receive the information they needed to develop adequate parenting and childcare skills. Specifically, the visit protocols include:
Not reported.
Home visitors were middle-aged, college-educated women. They also served as paraprofessional health educators in the CAMP prenatal clinic.
The home visitor was always present in the waiting room at the prenatal clinic to meet with patients individually and in small groups to provide anticipatory parenting instruction and support. This enabled the home visitor to introduce concepts and information they planned to cover in detail after delivery, at a time when prevention rather than problem detection could be emphasised, and when the teenage parents were most open to new information about child rearing.
As such, by delivery the home visitor had established a close, friendly, working relationship with most families.
The home visitor worked in close collaboration with other members of the CAMP staff, meeting weekly with them to develop strategies for addressing identified problems. This multidisciplinary approach ensured that young mothers had several supportive adults in their social support networks. It also ensured the home visitor had access to the resources and services the teenagers needed to achieve their goals.
1 RCT conducted in the USA with a sample of 145 people (Stevens-Simon et al. 2001).
16 Feb 2023
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