1001 Days Movement champions babies during COVID

The First 1001 Days Movement’s work to ensure that babies’ needs are understood and prioritised has continued:

On Wednesday 6th May, 1001 Days Members, Home-Start UK, Best Beginnings and the Parent Infant Foundation, together with the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, launched a new survey to gather the experiences and concerns of families who are experiencing lockdown during their babies’ first 1001 days. This will ensure that future work – both service delivery and advocacy – is informed by an understanding of families’ experienced and needs. Headline results from the survey will be released in Infant Mental Health Awareness Week in June. 

Organisations and professionals working with famileis are asked to share the views to ensure that the survey captures the views of parents of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds from across the UK. The survey can be found here  https://crweblab.com/parents-babies-and-COVID-19.

On Friday 8th May, we submitted a response to the Health and Social Care Select Committee‘s inquiry into Delivering Core NHS and Care Services during the Pandemic and Beyond. Our full response is below. In it, we highlight the importance of protecting babies’ wellbeing, given the pervasive and long-term impacts of stress and adversity during this critical stage in their development. We call for leadership to protect the interests of babies in decision making and a cross-Government Recovery Strategy for Children that fully addresses the needs of babies and their families. The submission covers issues relating to:

• Workforce: the need to rebuild and strengthen community services.
• Identification and Assessment: the need for a greater focus on the most vulnerable and a concerted effort to identify those who are at risk.
• Intervention: the need to boost capacity to deal with both the backlog and significantly increased need for services.
• Resourcing: the need for investment now to prevent long-term costs.
• Ways of working: the need to make careful, informed decisions before any new ways of working are normalised.
• Equity: the need to ensure all providers are supported to deliver safe and high-quality services.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://parentinfantfoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/200507-HS-Committe-response-3.pdf” title=”200507 HS Committe response”]