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Join our online workshop and help deliver better mental health support for babies and parents

Parent-infant relationships are central to mental health in early life. We already know that difficulties in parent-infant relationships increase with adversity, including low-income, and that families experiencing lots of difficulties are at the highest risk.

Specialist parent-infant teams are available in some areas of the UK to help with parent-infant relationship difficulties and support infant mental health, but here in the North East and North Cumbria region, there is just one specialist parent-infant service and this can only be accessed by families within Newcastle.

The Government’s recently-announced Start for Life funding includes money specifically for infant mental health services, to increase access to them. Start for Life is a package of support for vulnerable families worth more than £1 billion which aims to help every child gets the best possible start in life.

So how can service commissioners in the North East and North Cumbria make the best use of these new funds to deliver the best possible services for local babies?

A new project is underway in our region to create a support tool that can help professionals to commission parent-infant mental health services. It is led by Dr Bronia Arnott from Newcastle University and Dr Karen Bateson, an Independent Clinical Psychologist, in collaboration with the Parent-Infant Foundation.

The work aims to address inequality in the system; understanding who could commission these services in the region, what their support needs are around commissioning, and to work with them to co-develop a tool to meet these needs and facilitate the commissioning process. Ultimately helping commissioners to spend the money in a way that will help families in need.

The project runs until October 2022, and includes interviewing commissioners from across the region to gain an in-depth understanding of the barriers and facilitators to commissioning parent-infant services in the current changing landscape – including the move to Integrated Care Systems.

We’re continuing to look for any professionals in the North East and North Cumbria area who commission children’s services, family support or perinatal mental health services who would like to be involved.

“Discussing my experience to improve services for others brings light and positivity to a particularly difficult and painful period of my life” – Mum H

The voice of families has informed the project. Through a range of Public Involvement and Community Engagement (PICE) activities, parents have talked about their experiences and identified that we need more specialist parent-infant relationship teams, to build better mental health for babies and their parents.

Through creative methods such as story boards and poems, parents are helping the team to develop anonymous case studies of typical families who may need specialised parent infant team support. These case studies will be shared with commissioners during an online workshop to co-develop the commissioning support tool, ensuring the needs of families are included in the process.

Take part in a workshop

As part of Infant Mental health Awareness Week, we are inviting commissioners from across the North East and North Cumbria region to participate in an online workshop so they have the opportunity to be involved in creating something that works for them.

For further information about this work and to book your place on a workshop (dates and times to be confirmed), please contact: [email protected]

Read more about the project to co-develop a new commissioning tool for parent-infant relationship teams in our region

The project is funded by the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration North East and North Cumbria.