Nurse-Family Partnership®, a leading non-profit organization addressing the needs of low income, first-time parents and their children, has received a $210,000 grant from the WellPoint Foundation. The WellPoint Foundation, a private, non-profit organization wholly funded by WellPoint, Inc., promotes WellPoint's inherent commitment to enhance the health and well-being of individuals and families in communities that WellPoint's affiliate health plans serve. The grant will be used to help augment Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) nurse home visitors' ongoing educational and monitoring efforts to reduce the rate of low birth-weight newborns among women enrolled in the NFP program.

The grant is specific to NFP sites in California, Colorado, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin. More than 400 NFP nurses and close to 5,000 NFP clients stand to benefit from this funding.

"We are grateful to the WellPoint Foundation for their generous support of NFP's efforts to help more women deliver healthy babies," said Thomas R. Jenkins, Jr., President and CEO, Nurse-Family Partnership.

"While NFP has strong evidence of helping to reduce pre-term deliveries which are associated with low birth weight there is much to be done, especially with more than 600,000 first-time mothers eligible for NFP every year," Jenkins added. "This grant will help our educational outreach efforts considerably."

"The WellPoint Foundation is proud to support Nurse-Family Partnership in their efforts to increase the number of healthy pregnancies in these communities," said Lance Chrisman, Executive Director, WellPoint Foundation. "We have high hopes that this grant will reap measurable benefits for families."

Today, Nurse-Family Partnership serves more than 22,000 families in 32 U.S. states in a program of ongoing nurse home visitation.

Source: Nurse-Family Partnership