The National Training Institute for Child Care Health Consultants (NTI), located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the national resource for training child care health consultant trainers in the United States. Established in 1997 with funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Services and Resources Administration, NTI supports the health and safety of young children in child care settings through the development of a national child care health consultant training program. NTI presents a state of the art Train-the-Trainer approach that includes both face-to-face and distance learning components.

NTI has developed and implemented this Train-the-Trainer program based on Caring for Our Children: National Health and Safety Performance Standard; Guidelines for Out-of-Home Child Care Programs.  These standards, published by APHA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care and Early Education, are the highest health and safety standards for child care facilities available in the United States. Accompanying these standards are specific guidelines for achieving best practice.

The NTI program ensures that qualified health and child care professionals from every U.S. state and territory are available to prepare child care health consultants, who in turn provide health and safety assessment and guidance to out-of-home child care centers and family child care homes. NTI recruits state and regional public health and early childhood education professionals with experience in training and child care to attend the program and return to their respective home bases to develop a system of training and mentoring child care health consultants. NTI offers participants skills and curriculum materials that optimize their ability to train child care health consultants. Alongside content that addresses promotion of health and safety in child care settings, two core skills areas are emphasized:

v  curriculum development and training

v  observation and consultation

The NTI course is 14 weeks long and awards 133.4 contact hours upon successful completion. As of November 2010, NTI has prepared 443 trainers who have in turn trained over 4,800 child care health consultants. NTI program graduates have represented all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. 

To learn more about NTI and child care health consultation, access free resources related to health and safety in child care or register for future trainings, please visit http://nti.unc.edu.