Grant recipient: The Regents of the University of Colorado
Term: 2016 –2017
Principal Investigator: David Olds, University of Colorado-Denver
Funding: $76,238
Summary: This 12-month project is a study of the long-term impacts of the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) on mortality among the mothers and children served by the program. As background, NFP is an evidence-based nurse home visitation program for first-time (mostly low-income and unmarried) mothers, which has been evaluated in three well-conducted RCTs in the U.S. (in Elmira NY, Memphis TN, and Denver CO). These studies have found a pattern of sizable, sustained effects on important child and maternal outcomes including reductions in child abuse and neglect and mothers’ number of subsequent births in their late teens and early twenties. This new project will expand on Dr. Olds and colleagues’ analysis of NFP’s impacts on mortality for mothers and children in the Memphis sample 21 years after random assignment. That analysis found promising, though not yet statistically significant, reductions in all-cause mortality for mothers (2.2% of NFP group mothers had died vs. 3.7% of control group mothers) and their children (0.9% of NFP group children had died vs. 2.7% of control group children).
Dr. Olds will use National Death Index data (i) to extend the follow-up period of the Memphis mortality impact analysis by an additional four years (i.e., to 25 years post-random assignment), and (ii) to conduct similar mortality impact analyses for the Elmira sample (37 years after random assignment) and the Denver sample (21 years after random assignment).
The study’s pre-specified analysis plan is linked here.
This study has been completed. A plain-language summary of the findings is available here.
