Mini-MEND: an obesity prevention initiative in a children's centre

Student health visitors led a Mini-MEND project for families with young children as part of their public health nursing course. The project gave a framework for the students and staff members from the children's centre to stimulate an awareness of health needs and facilitate health enhancing activities in terms of healthy eating and parenting. Reflection on the initiative identified application of the principles of health visiting and the domains of specialist community public health nursing, yet the pressures of current health visiting workloads mean that having developed public health skills to use with groups and communities, they may not be used by newly-qualified health visitors.