Design and evaluation of the StartingTogether App for home visits in preventive child health care

The StartingTogether program (in Dutch SamenStarten) is a family-centred method for early identification of social-emotional and behavioural problems in young children. Nurses in preventive child health care find it challenging to: determine family issues and need for care; provide education; refer to social services; increase parent empowerment. To mitigate these challenges, we developed and evaluated the StartingTogether App, offering nurses and parents conversational support, tailored education and information on social services. A mixed method design, consisting of a qualitative evaluation of the StartingTogether App, with group discussions with nurses ( = 14) and a pilot test ( = 5), and a randomized controlled trial, evaluating the effectiveness of the app. Nurses ( = 33) made home visits to parents ( = 194), in teams with or without the app. Nurses were surveyed on the challenges experienced during visits. Parents ( = 166) were surveyed on their satisfaction with health care and app. Nurses were interviewed on the benefits and barriers to use the app. Parents with the StartingTogether App were more satisfied with the visits than parents without ( = .002). Parents with a high educational level were more satisfied with the visits than the parents with a low educational level. With the app, their satisfaction level was similar (