Text: In March 2020, covid-19 changed the way Health Visiting Teams supported parents with new babies.
Early Years Workers: Mostly, our home visits stopped overnight
Early Years Workers: There were a lot of parents who were anxious
Maura Appleby, Principle Lead, Health, Stockport Family: Health visitors are commissioned by local authorities, our local councils, to provide a public health nursing service which enables families and children to have the best start in life.
Due to the pandemic, we had to reduce the number of face-to-face contacts with parents, and this was a concern.
Text: Without support, babies can be at risk. Parents can also suffer from mental illness.
Alexandra Jeffries, Early Years Worker, Stockport Family: Two of the main things that parents can really struggle with is infant feeding, for one, and crying and learning how to cope with a crying baby and the best way to manage that.
Laura Widdall, Infant feeding co-ordinator, Stockport Family: We had lots of parent with brand new babies, who were coming home. They may have had less support than they anticipated having from their friends and family. And so we needed to make sure that as a health visiting service, we were meeting some of those needs.
We had 12 early years workers who very quickly came forward with real enthusiasm and flexibility and were able to retrain them to work in a completely different environment.
Text: These early years workers supported the work of health visitors and were deployed to meet with new parents on maternity wards before they went home.
Key advice was offered on infant feeding and a new programme that deals with crying was adopted.
Laura Widdall, Infant feeding co-ordinator: We decided to look at the ICON programme, and that’s a really good programme that talks to parents about the fact that it’s normal for babies to cry as part of their way of communicating with us and also an opportunity to talk about ways to settle and soothe their babies and to tune into their babies and equally what to do when they feel that crying hasn’t stopped and they’re beginning to feel overwhelmed.
Text: The ICON Programme
I – Infant crying is normal and it will stop
C – Comfort methods can sometimes soothe the baby and they crying will stop
O – It’s OK to walk away if you have checked the baby is sage and they crying is getting to you
N – Never ever shake or hurt a baby
Alexandra Jeffries, Early Years Worker: A crying baby, especially if that baby’s been crying for a long period of time, it can bring up feeling of kind of stress, frustration, even anger.
Rochelle Morris, Early Years Worker, Stockport Family: We approach it by just having it as a gentle conversation with the families. It’s an amazing project and I think everyone should be running the ICON project. It’s amazing.
Valentina Ceccacci, New Parent: Having someone, you know running us through why the babies cry, how to cope with it, and not just the first few days. There’s kind of a breakdown in the leaflet they give you, that goes through the six, seven months and all the growth spurt that they have that can cause huge cries, and that was really, really useful.
Text: In 3 months, the team managed 917 face-to-face discussions with new parents.
Their work helped protect the NHS by offering early intervention, preventing more serious issues.
Valentina Ceccacci, New Parent: During a pandemic, really they were my only point of touch, and face-to-face as well with the feeding team so I just couldn’t have done without them I think.
Alexandra Jeffries, Early Years Worker: Everybody has pulled together. We’ve been able to be flexible.
Rochelle Morris, Early Years Worker: We were very much, “What can we do for our families?”
Laura Widdall, Infant feeding coordinator: It would be really wonderful to see more nurses joining organisations such as Stockport Family who are providing that support to families with young children, to increase the range of support that we could offer. When we recognise that supporting families means better outcomes for children.