Our Pathway Template is a flexible tool to help local areas to create and present a parent-infant relationships care pathway

The Parent-Infant Relationships (PAIR) Pathway Template is a great way to summarise:  

• what is available locally to support infant mental health, emotional wellbeing and parent-infant relationships.
• practice guidance such as underpinning values and principles, how to gather information, making decisions and matching families’ needs to the right support at the right time.  

The template provides an overarching care pathway structure but is editable so that you can collate, map and organise information about local activities and services. 

Completing this template is a helpful process which facilitates inter-agency dialogue, integrated working, gap-analysis and system transformation.  

Once completed, your pathway will help frontline practitioners, service managers, commissioners and local partnership boards to better co-ordinate and provide PAIR guidance, support and treatment. A pathway is a central component of a parent-infant relationships strategy.   

How to use the Pathway Template  

The template comes in the form of a Microsoft Word document, which is:  

• Editable - so that you can add or change information, weblinks and QR codes about local activities and services, best practice and local guidance, and update it easily. 
• Adaptable – it can be mapped onto whichever language or model you use locally to describe levels of need.
• Concise - it distils lots of complex information into a deceptively simple format. 

See supporting guidance for how to use the pathway template, including top tips.  

Many local areas find that a service mapping exercise for parent-infant relationships is a helpful first step in the process. The Parent-Infant Foundation has a freely available online mapping tool to support you.  

How was it developed?  

The PAIRs pathway template was developed by experienced PAIR practitioners at the Parent-Infant Foundation in collaboration with several Start for Life partnerships across England. ¹ 

Many local areas were developing their own PAIR pathway but running into similar challenges about how to lay out the page, how much information to include, how to explain levels of need and what to do at each level, and how to make core topics like safeguarding more visible.    

Several different iterations were tested and refined to get to the template presented here. This template is now being implemented in new areas and we would welcome hearing from you about how it is being used and adapted locally. Please get in touch with us at: [email protected]