The first toolkit for specialised parent-infant relationship teams
02 October 2019
The Parent-Infant Foundation today launches a comprehensive toolkit to support local areas wanting to set up or further develop a specialised parent-infant relationship team.
We have brought together practice experts, team managers, researchers, academics, commissioners and programme developers to share their learnings and create a web-based toolkit so that new teams can be set up more quickly and easily.
This comprehensive resource includes information for commissioners, service providers and practitioners on what a parent-infant team offers, the types of relationship difficulties they support, their role in advising and supporting the wider early years workforce, and the compelling case for having a team in place locally.
We’re launching the Toolkit alongside the Parent-Infant Foundation’s new vision and strategy for the coming five years, with the clear mission to support the growth and quality of parent-infant teams across the UK. We hope that this detailed and well-informed resource will prove to be invaluable to teams at every stage of their development journey.
The lead author of the Toolkit, the Foundation’s Head of Clinical Strategy, Dr Karen Bateson, said “all babies need a sensitive, nurturing relationship to lay the foundation for lifelong mental and physical health, yet specialised parent-infant relationship teams are not yet part of mainstream family services across the UK. One reason for this is that up to this point, there has been no clear ‘blueprint’ for how to establish, resource, implement, and evaluate them. It’s a sign of the commitment from experts around the country that they have given up their time for free to contribute to such a richly detailed toolkit for new teams.”
We have presented the Toolkit in chapters, each with practical guidance on the various steps in the journey of setting up a team, including getting started with families, assessments and outcome measures, supporting and training the wider workforce, plus a wealth of resources to help with decision-making and provision of relevant evidence.
We, the newly-named Parent-Infant Foundation, are delighted to be able to share our experience and expertise in having supported the development of seven PIP teams in recent years, enhanced by the experiences of other parent-infant relationship teams from around the national Parent-Infant Network.
This first version of the Toolkit is being rigorously tested during 2019-2020 through a National Lottery-funded project running county-wide in Essex. We also welcome constructive comments and feedback from others working in the sector ahead of version two being created in January 2021.