Delivered by Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, this project aims to help families understand the importance of good mental health and offers support where there are concerns or challenges with the parent-infant relationship as a result of for example, a traumatic birth, loss or bereavement, low mood or anxiety.
Little Minds Matter: Bradford Infant Mental Health Service is a Better Start Bradford project delivered by Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust. It aims to help families understand the importance of good mental health and offers support where there are concerns or challenges with the parent-infant relationship as a result of for example, a traumatic birth, loss or bereavement, low mood or anxiety.
It is funded by The National Lottery Community Fund with additional funding from the Reducing Inequalities in City programme led by the Bradford District and Craven Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).
Work has been challenging during the pandemic but it has continued. Two months before the onset of the lockdown in March 2020, Family Therapist Helen Vincent had been working with a mother and baby. COVID restrictions meant face to face contact was no longer possible. However, mother was living in a refuge with her baby and did not speak English.
The mother and Helen were able to speak on the phone with an interpreter present but this significantly impacted the interventions that Helen was able to offer and could have threatened the building of a therapeutic relationship. The family were not able to afford data to access the offer of digital sessions using video calling.
Funding was secured through the local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to provide the family with a device pre-loaded with data to enable video sessions with Little Minds Matter. Helen engaged the family in Video Interactive Guidance (VIG) where parent-infant interactions were videoed. These videos were reviewed together to address mum’s goal of wanting to better understand what her baby was communicating to her and know how to respond.
The family consistently engaged with the service for another 10-months using video calling. The Mothers’ Object Relations Scale (MORS) outcome measure indicated that mum felt less overwhelmed by caring for her baby. Mum reported a positive change in their relationship and described being a 10/10, having reached her goal by their planned ending.