Enhanced Family & Doula Services
an affiliate of Healthy Families America

Project First Step (PFS) has been offering doula services since 2000, as a form of prevention for prematurity and birth defects in high risk, low income families.  However, in 2011, the service partnered with Healthy Families America (HFA), a national initiative of Prevent Child Abuse America which provides support to new parents and to families facing greater challenges.

Moms-to-be who have a disability can be referred or self-referred to the program and be matched with a doula, or a professionally trained birthing assistant, who will provide emotional and physical support to the mom during labor, delivery and the post-partum process. The doula serves mothers at risk for having babies born with disabilities and provides support through education, advocacy and connection to community resources. Our doula service is unique in that it begins assisting the expectant woman soon after conception. Present throughout labor and delivery, the doula offers the mother alternatives to medication intervention and provides emotional support. She also follows the mother and child’s progress after the delivery to ensure safety and bonding.

The success of this program has been phenomenal, as on average 96% of all babies delivered while participating in this program have been full-term, healthy infants - a statistic that rivals healthy births from the general population.  (Read more about our success rates.)

The doula can provide:

Mothers who qualify for services typically have one of the following:

• Mental health or mental retardation diagnosis
• Drug and/or alcohol concerns or dependency
  
• Physical disability
• Medically compromised pregnancy
• Severe social concern that could impair the pregnancy or parenting

The affiliation with HFA, which became effective in 2011, allows PFS to increase the benefits to participating families. While we continue to offer the same services to the same popluation, our enhanced family and doula services are now married to the HFA model, which means in addition to accepting prenatal referrals, we can accept referrals to families where an infant is up to 3 months of age.  Additionally, families will still be evaluated post-partum and with new HFA extensive assesment tools, we can keep serving families up to 3 years, based on need, which is longer than we could keep cases open under our old service.

HFA is an evidence-based model, and our redesigned services now follow one of their pre-drafted curriculums, which follows 12 critical elements.  PFS chose the Partners for a Healthy Baby Home Visiting curriculum, as designed by Florida State University.  This curriculum means our PFS staff will meet with the family at least weekly for the first six months and determine how frequently or infrequently the family needs support for the next six months.  With training materials, books, and handouts the staff and families can use together, the family will work the curriculum for at least one year before their final evaluation. 

The affiliation also requires mandatory national HFA training for our staff, which provides resources and networking to best practices in similar programming across the United States.
 
PFS was the first program in the state of Pennsylvania to affiliate with HFA, and we are very excited to offer newly expanded enhanced family and doula services in the Erie and Venango county communities.