Nurse-Family Partnership and Geography: An Intersectional Perspective

Nurse-Family Partnership is a targeted public health intervention program designed to improve child and maternal health through nurse home visiting. In the context of a process evaluation, we posed the question: “In what ways do Canadian public health nurses explain their experiences with delivering this program across different geographical environments?” The qualitative methodology of interpretive description guided study decisions and data were collected through 10 focus groups with 50 nurses conducted over 2 years. We applied an intersectionality lens to explore the influence of all types of geography on the delivery of Nurse-Family Partnership. The findings from our analysis suggest that the nature of clients’ place and their associated social and physical geography emphasizes inadequacies of organizational and support structures that create health inequities for clients. Geography had a significant impact on program delivery for clients who were living with multiple forms of oppression and it worked to reinforce disadvantage.