Hello Everyone from Belfast Northern Ireland
The SIGNETS service is a small parent Infant Relationship Team based within the wider Health Visiting service in a busy Health & Social Care Trust in Belfast Northern Ireland. The Belfast Trust area covers a vast geographical area which includes urban, rural and semi-rural areas.
The SIGNETS service has evolved over time and we are now a specialist therapeutic intervention service, using a strengths based approach working with parents and primary care givers to build positive attuned relationships with their baby or child. We work with antenatal parents from 28 weeks of pregnancy and parents and families from birth to 4 years of age, putting families at the heart of all we do.
As a team we are trained in NBO and are currently expanding this to include NBAS. We offer various therapeutic interventions to families with an aim to support parents in connecting, observing, listening and understanding their baby’s communications. The NBO is one of the interventions we use as great way of introducing how baby’s communicate and how each baby is unique in their likes and dislikes.
Families are referred into our service from our health visiting colleagues and via our specialist maternity services. Our service works with families with a range of social complexity issues such as substance misuse, maternal mental health issues, and families on the edge of care or within the safeguarding system.
Our input with families is assessed on an individual basis and the therapeutic interventions are discussed with a family to ensure we are meeting the need at the most appropriate time for them. Alongside our one to one work we also deliver an early intervention 26 week parenting programme, which we deliver with a group of up to 10 parents and babies. The individual therapeutic interventions we undertake are NBO, NBAS, Video interactive guidance, sleep support, challenging behaviour support, baby massage, baby yoga, Solihull plus and incredible years programmes.
We began introducing NBO to our clients following our training with Brazelton back in 2020 where we felt this intervention would be a fantastic fit to our strengths based approach, in supporting parents in learning how to understand what their baby is communicating to them through their subtle signals, cues and vocalisations as they demonstrate their likes, dislikes and needs. We have found that the NBO helps parents to build in confidence in their care of their infants, supporting a reciprocal relationship which are attuned. As a service we also offer to complete an NBO or NBAS to families of infants who are very unsettled or demonstrating feeding issues with a possibility of a cows milk protein allergy or intolerance. We promote this as it supports parents who often state they feel helpless during these times.
The difference this is making within our service and the wider health visiting service is, parents feel more empowered and confident in trying new things to support their babies as well as upskilling them in how to understand what their baby is communicating. Parents enjoy learning their baby’s likes and dislikes. We have also found that parents are more comfortable in supporting their baby introducing time to play, relax, talk, cuddle and respond.
Our future hopes would be to have every health visitor based in the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust trained in the NBO and for every baby within the health visiting service to be offered and NBO as part of our core universal service and not just as part of a specialist intervention.