I graduated as a nurse in 2001 and a community health nurse in 2008. I have been involved with children and their parents all my working life. First in the hospital setting and later by providing healthcare to families in their own homes.
I first became interested in the PUF program during my studies as a community health nurse. It was there I heard about the development of this standardised tool that allowed us as community health nurses to ensure that we got ‘all the way around’ the young child’s development during our last visit in the child’s first year of life.
When I was trained in the PUF program in 2018, I found it both a meaningful and useful tool for community health nurses and for parents.
The recognition that extra initiatives are needed for children identified in the PUF study later gave me the courage to join the VIPP-PUF development group. In this context, as a community health nurse I contribute to developing and testing the VIPP-PUF initiative for Danish conditions.
For me, the VIPP-PUF initiative has been a small revolution in my way of working with families – and I find that I have become a better community health nurse and have far more potential to help families with infants.
As a permanently affiliated project community health nurse in the research project Infant Health, I have had the opportunity to continue working with supervision of VIPP-PUF courses and with ensuring the quality of the initiative in the project municipalities, which is very meaningful and interesting.
At the same time, I am still employed two days a week in Roskilde Municipality’s health service, where I help offer the VIPP-PUF initiative to families who wish to participate in the project. As a community health nurse, I am very excited that research is being conducted in our profession. I believe that we have a very important and relevant task in our society – and also a task that must have high quality solutions, as we are working with the very start of life and the formation of families.