"Appreciating the qualities of a good & effective health visitor"

I really enjoyed having our health visitor for our first two children and was looking forward to seeing them again when our third was born in 2022. However at the last minute due to them having other work commitments, I was assigned a different health visitor. This change made us appreciate our first health visitor all the more, for her professionalism and ability to either provide us with correct information or look up any information we asked for, if she did not have the answers right away.

By contrast, the new health visitor would often show up looking flustered, with cold scales to weigh the baby and apologise they had left the equipment in their car overnight and that’s why it was cold. In addition the equipment was unclean.

The new health visitor gave us incorrect information, even once causing us to unnecessarily take our older kids out of school for an appointment for the baby because they had assuredly told us the appointment would take a couple of hours at least. Had they been correct, we would not have made it back in time to pick up the children from school, when it turned out the appointment took less than 20 minutes. Rather than apologising for causing us inconvenience or accepting they were wrong they just said that it was good we didn't have to wait.

A little while later we got another health visitor who came across as professional, clean, friendly, helpful.  In the end I only saw this health visitor once before I was reassigned back to the health visitor who had looked after our first two children. Our last HV wrote a very kind message explaining the change and wishing us well.

Having had three different health visitors, two great and one not so , made me appreciate more deeply the qualities required to be a good and effective health visitor. I highly recommend both our first and last health visitors.