My name is Lorna Curran. In 2022 I was privileged to be offered the post of Parent-Infant Therapist and tasked with setting up an Infant Mental Health service within Argyll & Bute Health and Social Care Partnership.
For those who aren’t familiar with Argyll & Bute (A&B), it is an area in the west of Scotland covering 6,700 kilometres of land including 23 inhabited islands!
As you can imagine, starting up a service as a lone practitioner covering such a large geographical area was very daunting. None the less, I was passionate and ready for the challenge given such an exciting vision for the service:
“…to embed the ‘voice of the infant’ throughout A&B communities and develop an ‘infant central service’ supporting universal services with an ‘infant centred approach’.
This would be achieved by:
- Routine consideration of infant experience/need
- Articulate and integrate the infants voice in everything we do
- Support and enhance vital early relationships
As part of training to support my endeavours to set up the service I undertook training in the Newborn Behavioural Observations system in 2023. I was immediately struck by how the NBO fitted so well with our IMH Service vision whilst also complimenting The Scottish Governments ‘Voice of the Infant: Best Practice Guidelines and Infant Pledge’, 2023.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/voice-infant-best-practice-guidelines-infant-pledge/
“All babies and young children have a right to meaningful participation, but as they may be preverbal, non-speaking or still developing language, practitioners will need to access innovative ways of facilitating this.”
What is NBO and how did I use it?
The NBO system is a tool, used with babies from birth to 3 months old, created to help parents and practitioners share together the uniqueness of a baby, through observing their behaviour, which is their language and promotes interactions between parents and their infants. It is a brief interaction lasting about half an hour and provides baby with a voice and supports them to make meaningful contribution. Giving information to parents about how their baby communicates can help them see and hear what is happening and helps adopt an approach of shared curiosity, leaving space for the baby which is essential for healthy brain development.
With my NBO certification complete I set out to undertake a pilot using the NBO for the service. I am very grateful to the Mid-Argyll Midwifery team who were so enthusiastic from the very beginning to be part of this project which would involve offering an NBO session to all babies born within Mid-Argyll over a six-month period.
The pilot ran from Oct 2023- March 2024. There were 38 births in that time and 20 Accepted the offer of an NBO which was carried out by me within 3 weeks of referral. Five of the referring midwives were able to attend and observe the NBO session.
I am thrilled to share the outcomes of this project which far exceeded my greatest expectations. The feedback from both parents and the midwives was overwhelmingly positive.
Parents said…
Midwives said…
We have been sharing these positive findings both within our locality and nationally. My hope and dream is to embed NBO universally across our Midwifery and Health Visitor services throughout A&B and I am in preliminary talks with my manager and the Midwifery Lead Professional in how we can make this dream a reality.
In the meantime, though the pilot is formally finished, I have continued offering NBO sessions to every new born in Mid Argyll. As a Parent-Infant therapist I have this unique opportunity to educate and support new parents to open their hearts and minds to their babies and in return for babies to show their capacity and willingness to connect with and change and transform all who enter into their social world. Through NBO witnessing the new-borns amazing capabilities has made my job much more satisfying and joyful.
I cannot express how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to train in the NBO and to be recently offered the opportunity to become a Brazelton Champion. But most importantly I am so grateful to the amazing Mid Argyll midwifery team for embracing the NBO and sharing an insight into their roles which has led to my absolute respect and led to a stronger working relationship.
To conclude, I would like to thank all the parents and babies with whom I had the privilege to meet during this pilot and allowing for that space to think about and share curiosity about their baby’s emotional world and to get to know them better.
(Jan Smith, M/W, Lorna Curran, Parent-Infant Therapist, Cheryl McKay, M/W, Rachel Dunsmore-Chambers, Infant Support Worker)
