The Healthy Start Coalition of Miami-Dade is a Touchpoints Site.
Being a Touchpoints Site
The Brazelton Touchpoints Center® partners with local coalitions of multidisciplinary providers to make and sustain change on behalf of children and families. Each of these “sites” works closely with Brazelton Touchpoints Center® to integrate the Touchpoints Approach in their work with children and families. Touchpoints sites demonstrate a strong commitment at all levels to working collaboratively to support families during their children’s most formative years.
What is expected of a Touchpoints Site?
Each Touchpoints site engages with Brazelton Touchpoints Center® in a multi-year commitment to integrate the Touchpoints Approach within a defined "area of impact" (where and to whom the Touchpoints Team is authorized to deliver the Touchpoints Training Program™). Sites make a commitment that:
· Individual providers will learn to use the Touchpoints Approach in their work with children and families
· Providers will support the use of the Touchpoints Approach in practice
· Providers will organize and develop programs and services that are consistent with the Approach (e.g. improve coordination and collaboration) and
· Providers will develop a plan to engage other providers that serve the same children and families to integrate Touchpoints into their work.
What are the benefits of integrating Touchpoints into practice?
The Touchpoints Approach is a strengths-based intervention that activates and supports the expertise and capacity of families to provide sensitive and nurturing caregiving. Using the Approach, providers identify opportunities to work together with families to bring about better health and readiness to learn outcomes for children. The Touchpoints Approach offers strategies for building relationships between families and children, providers and families, and providers with one another. Providers move beyond rescuing children to strengthening families.
Using the Touchpoints Approach, providers experience greater understanding of child/family development and effectiveness in communicating with families and working across cultures. Integrating the Approach helps mitigate staff burnout and enhances job satisfaction.
The Touchpoints Approach aspires to rehumanize health care and transform child care into family care. Providers are urged to reorganize service delivery around family needs and strengths. Organizations use the Approach to help meet quality standards in health care and child care and to enhance coordination and collaboration among providers working with the same families.
Brazelton Touchpoints Center
1295 Boylston Street, Suite 320, Boston, MA 02215
Phone: 857-218-4451 / Fax: 617- 730-0060
eMail: touchpoints@childrens.harvard.edu
For more information visit www.touchpoints.org
Touchpoints is a practical approach for enhancing the competence of parents and building strong family-child relationships from before birth through the earliest years, laying the vital foundation for children’s healthy development. Brazelton Touchpoints Center® programs and services are designed to shift the paradigm of care so that service delivery systems are appropriately focused on discovering and meeting the needs of families.
Professional Development
The Touchpoints professional development program is not just knowledge acquisition, but a practical method for changing the way families are served. As a knowledge and experience-based program, providers work to continuously enhance their proficiency in utilizing the Touchpoints model.
Resource for Proven Strategies
Brazelton Touchpoints Center® serves as a resource for proven strategies, best practices and documentation for addressing change issues. By facilitating the exchange of these experiences, challenges and successes, it increases the capacity of every provider to (1) align resources at an organizational level to support the Touchpoints approach and (2) engage and collaborate effectively with other providers.
Knowledge Development
Brazelton Touchpoints Center® is an important contributor to knowledge development. Brazelton Touchpoints Center® faculty work together with members of the Brazelton Touchpoints network and outside experts to learn how to support the needs of families of children more effectively. They have developed new ways of working across cultures, engaging fathers as caregivers, serving families of children with special needs and other applications of the Touchpoints model of practice.
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When we strengthen families, we ultimately strengthen the community. Our goal is that parents everywhere work with supportive providers, feel confident in their parenting role, and form strong, resilient attachments with their children. To help achieve this, providers must be responsive to parents, knowledgeable about child development, and eager to see every parent succeed.
-T. Berry Brazelton, MD, Founder |
