Child Care Health Consultation (CCHC) is a Best Starts for Kids strategy that promotes the health, safety, and development of children and child care providers in child care settings. Child care health consultants provide culturally and linguistically responsive coaching to licensed and non-licensed child care providers across a variety of topics.
In 2019, Cardea began a collaborative process for a deeper evaluation of the new Best Starts CCHC strategy by exploring:
- types of CCHC services,
- how CCHC services and unique approaches contribute to provider outcomes, and
- how CCHC services have been developed, implemented, and revised over time.
Emerging themes from the 2019 CCHC evaluation led to continued evaluation through early 2022 to expand on these themes and explore common elements of CCHC; the impact of service delivery on child, family, and provider outcomes; and to estimate the number of children receiving care from child care providers who received CCHC services. The timeline of the evaluation also presented a unique opportunity to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on CCHC service delivery and outcomes, as well as the myriad ways in which CCHC consultation service delivery was adapted in response to the pandemic.
