What is a health visitor? What do they do? Indulge me for a moment and reflect on your immediate response to that question. Weighing babies was in there, wasn’t it? Don’t worry, you’re not alone — I recently asked a random sample of service users and healthcare professionals the same question and ‘weighing babies’ also featured highly in their perception of the health visitor’s role. Few could explain the role succinctly and most struggled to quantify exactly what it is we do. Indeed, my own health visitor colleagues had trouble explaining their jobs as they represent so many things to so many people.
