Top 5 Reasons Why Your Home Visiting Program Needs the Updated LSP

We’re excited to announce that Life Skills Progression™ (LSP), the widely used outcome and intervention planning instrument for use with families at risk, will be available in an updated new edition next month. Developed by Linda Wollesen and Brad Richardson, this second edition of the LSP is a field-tested, validated, and reliable tool that generates a broad, accurate portrait of the life skills of parents, caregivers, and young children from birth to 5.

Why is this tool a must for home visiting programs, and why make the switch to the new edition? Here are the top five reasons to invest in the Life Skills Progression™ (LSP), Second Edition.

1. Helps you demonstrate the effectiveness of your program.

The LSP can be used to create a unique “big picture” of program, caseload, and family progress over time. When you repeat the LSP in 6-month increments, you’ll see clear evidence of the progress families make—and when the LSP is done for a whole caseload, you can analyze the data to reveal progressive intermediate outcomes.

Monitoring outcomes with the LSP is good for families and good for your whole program, too. Programs that can vividly demonstrate their effectiveness through data collection are in a much better position to secure continued funding. (And if home visiting programs across the country can prove how effective their services are, that’s one step closer to nationally funded universal visitation, especially for families living in poverty.)

2. Quick, systematic way to identify family needs and plan interventions.

For use with at-risk, low-income pregnant and parenting individuals, the LSP helps you evaluate a variety of important life skills in about 10 minutes. You’ll record information on 43 items in eight domains:

• Relationships with Family and Friends
• Relationships with Children
• Relationships with Supportive Resources
• Education and Employment
• Health and Medical Care
• Mental Health and Substance Abuse
• Basic Essentials
• Infant/Toddler Development

Results of the LSP will help you plan strategies, interventions, and reflective questions that can support a family’s progress and address their areas of need. The LSP will also highlight family and child strengths that should be noticed and celebrated!

3. Promotes families’ health literacy.

This second edition includes an important new chapter on using the LSP to promote maternal health literacy. Review the most common impediments to health literacy, get guidance on using LSP data to assess the health literacy of the parents in your program, and learn ways to provide accessible information and empower mothers to be independent learners.

4. Great for use with ASQ®-3 & ASQ®:SE-2.

If you use the ASQ screeners, you’ll find that the LSP is the ideal complement. With items that match the ASQ developmental areas, the LSP makes it easy to summarize the developmental data you gathered with the ASQ system.

5. Better and easier than ever.

The LSP’s new second edition includes updates and improvements based on customer surveys and feedback from the field. The LSP Instrument and downloads are now fillable PDFs, scoring descriptions have been updated for clarity, and the ancillary materials are now provided as convenient downloads. Plus, get timely guidance on completing the LSP during virtual home visits!

The second edition of the LSP is a powerful tool for helping families make progress and clearly demonstrating the good that your home visiting program does. Life Skills Progression™ (LSP), Second Edition, is scheduled for release in July 2024—order your copy today!

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