A former "Home Visitor" for Healthy Families who asked that her name be withheld, spoke with Massachusetts News about her experiences with the program. After answering an advertisement and sending in her resume, she was hired and sent to training.

Iwas excited about the program at first because it looked like an opportunity to get some training that I could use at home with my kids. I took different courses like how to relate to teenagers, got a certificate in CPR, learned about domestic violence, things like that. College wasn’t a requirement.

"During the first seminars, they taught us how to teach the girls to be better mothers. We learned stuff having to do with the baby, which was wonderful. I had a real desire to help these girls. I was on fire to do this because I remembered what it was like when I had my first baby. I would have loved to have something like this.

"The workers and my supervisor had their hearts in the right place. We all wanted to help young mothers. But then things changed for me. After a few months, we had to go to other meetings that I think were run by the Department of Health. They had a completely different spirit. It was a whole different ball-of-wax. I remember a bunch of us were really upset, the supervisors too.

"What happened was we were going to become computerized. We had to put all this data into it now after every visit. Before that, we’d write out answers to some questions, like how the visit went or what you taught the girl. But now it was like all these nosy questions.

"They wanted us to build trust. Yet they wanted us after a couple of visits to take out this form with all sorts of questions and have them sign it. Our argument was, ‘Hey, some of these girls don’t trust us. They’ve had bad experiences with DSS and got burned. It’s already difficult to get into their house. It really is.’

"If they read the form really fast it sounds like nothing can be shared, but if they read it closely, information can be shared."

Information to State

"My supervisor was ticked off because the information was going right to the Department of Health. The people we visited didn’t know that. It didn’t say that. They had no clue we were sitting down after every visit and putting four pages of information into a computer. So we decided in our office that we weren’t going to put all the real nosy stuff in. We just put ‘unknown.’

"They wanted to know the father of the baby, the facial expressions of the mother, her demeanor, the condition of the house on a scale of 1 to 5, how the mother was dressed. You know, what the hell does that have to do with…In other words, you’re painting a picture for them of the house and the mother.

"But wait a minute. Sometimes we drop in at seven in the morning. They just got up. Who’s going to get dressed and have time to clean the house? All we cared about was getting in there and helping them take care of their baby. We didn’t feel that other stuff was right.

"I remember when they were training us how to enter data from the forms into the computer. We raised our hands and said, ‘Hold on, it’s not on the form they signed that all this data about them was being entered into a computer.’ The girls had no clue this was happening. This was an invasion of their privacy. They just said to us, ‘This is for their own good.’ Then they kind of avoided it and didn’t like it when we protested.

"Some of us didn’t like it but the other half of the room didn’t care. They were saying, ‘What’s the big deal?’ My supervisor said it was because they weren’t real social workers. A lot of these Healthy Families offices are contracted community agencies that don’t use true social workers.

"My supervisor learned social work in college and their big thing was the importance of keeping people’s privacy.

"Then we had to go to another whole series of meetings about mandatory vaccinations. They wanted us to go into the homes and ask for their baby’s blue vaccination book. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but we presented ourselves as their trusted friend. Then we ask for the blue book. They asked us, ‘Why?’ A lot of them, of course, don’t take their baby to the doctor on time to get vaccinations and some of them don’t want to because they think it’s harmful.

"But, ‘You will go in and ask for their blue book.’ They are setting up this program for these girls in a false light. Some of the girls then dropped out of the program because they felt we weren’t what we said. We weren’t just there to be their friend and to help them. Now we’re coming in snooping on them. They don’t want that. So the blue book was another aspect I didn’t like that the Department of Health made us do. They also told us we are mandated reporters."

Hospital Gave Us Names

"My supervisor would call up Milford Hospital. We were given a list from the hospital of girls who just had babies. The coordinator there would give us an idea who she thought was high-risk. We would try to get a profile from the hospital, such as is the girl married or single, poor, things like that. They knew we would be interested in the names of those we thought really needed help.

"I was there when Healthy Families just started. It was a new program. We needed girls and babies. We went out with brochures and took them to schools, guidance counselors, wherever there were girls. We showed them our brochure and talked about our program. We told them to call and let us know if any girl is pregnant and to ask the girl if we could call them.

"To entice the girls, we made up these baskets with little doodads for the baby. It also had shampoo, soap and stuff like that for the mother. First we’d call them and get the appointment, which was the toughest part. They were suspicious at first. It was really hard to get them to say, ‘Yeah, come to my house.’ It was an art. It took getting creative.

"I’d call and say, ‘Hi, the hospital just let us know you had a baby; Congratulations! Is it a boy or a girl? I’m with Healthy Families and I’m going to be giving away free gift baskets for all the girls in your area who just had babies. I’d like to drop one off at your house and let you know about our program.’ I’d tell them a little about it. I’d tell them I know how hard it is to have a baby, that I am a mother myself. I told them I had a lot of questions my first time and that’s all we are there for, to help you answer those questions.

"We’d tell them up front that we got their name from such and such hospital. We’d ask, ‘Did they tell you about Healthy Families?’ They would say, ‘Maybe,’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘I don’t remember,’ or, ‘Yeah, I guess they did.’ The hospital would probably tell them about it and they maybe just said ‘Yeah’ and forgot about it."

It Was Depressing

"I made really good friends with some of these girls. I could call some of them now and have them come over. A few had problems with DSS and it took a while to get their trust. They didn’t need any more of that crap. It took a lot of faith for some of them to do it.

"We had to classify the girls at different levels, like if we thought they were at-risk. We did report some girls to DSS. Others that we thought were at-risk were put on the monthly report. If we suspected drug use, we considered them at-risk. We didn’t have to see it, just suspect it. We looked at the apartment and if it looked like they didn’t have enough money, they were at-risk.

"I felt incapable of doing this job after a while. I told my supervisor we need to hire someone who is licensed for counseling. It was one thing to go in there and teach them about babies but another role was we had to be counselors. They hired anybody. Nobody at work there had any kind of background in counseling or psychology. It’s the same at DSS where they send these social workers in that don’t know what the hell they’re doing."After awhile I got so depressed after visiting some of these people because I just felt so incapable of helping them. They shouldn’t be giving inexperienced workers the authority to assess some of these girls."
 

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