About this event

Tuesday 20th September 9.00am – 11.00am free to members and non-members

Programme

9 am – Welcome

Andrea Katz, Clinical Director, AiMH UK and Zoe Challis, Lead Nursery Nurse, Cornwall Specialist Perinatal Mental Health Team

9:20 – 10:05 am

Guest Speaker, Dr Amanda Jones (Strategic & Clinical Lead and Consultant Perinatal Psychotherapist for NELFT NHS Foundation Trust’s Perinatal Parent Infant Mental Health Service (PPIMHS).

Title: Understanding and working with concerns about a parent’s capacity to be ‘good enough’

For any professional, developing an opinion on what constitutes ‘good enough’ parenting care is a complicated task. It involves getting to know a parent’s history and trying to understand a parent’s conscious and unconscious conflicting feelings about their baby. The lecture will describe a model to help clinicians systematically think about what’s important from a baby’s point of view and a way of sharing concerns with a parent and proactively addressing concerns.

10:05 am Break

10:10: am – 11.00am

Natasha Arnstice, Specialist Health Visitor, Perinatal & Infant Mental Health, Together for Families, Cornwall Council

Title: Opening up conversations with parents

Natasha will share her simple model for identifying if parents are struggling with their babies. She will share strength-based and compassion-based approaches for responding to parents who may be struggling. Natasha will describe how she is developing this model to be used across services in Cornwall, so that there is a shared language for identifying early relational difficulties for parents and infants.

Dr Amanda Jones BIO

Dr Amanda Jones is a Consultant Perinatal Psychotherapist and Strategic & Clinical Lead of NELFT NHS Foundation Trust’s Perinatal Parent Infant Mental Health Service. She trained as a systemic therapist and pursued her doctoral research at the Tavistock Centre/UEL. Her research studied how mothers’ use of maladaptive defensive processes can derail their baby’s development. In collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, Amanda was the therapist in the Channel Four documentaries ‘Help me love my baby’. With the NSPCC and Warwick Medical School she made 5 further documentaries called ‘Breakdown or Breakthrough: pregnancy, birth and the first 18 months of life’, available for free online, for all practitioners working with parents and babies in distress. Amanda speaks at national and international conferences on psychodynamic parent-baby treatment. She contributes in several governmental policy groups to try and enhance understanding about the importance of early intervention and the need to develop equitable integrated psychotherapy and psychiatric NHS community perinatal parent infant mental health services in the UK.

Natasha Anstice BIO

Originally from Cornwall and moved to London to complete her Mental health nurse training in east London, which led to the interest in trauma and how relationships within a ‘family and community’ can have a significant impact on the life of infants/children. This professional interest saw Natasha undertake additional training in systemic family therapy and into the role of Health visiting. Having returned to Cornwall as a health visitor and started her own family she now has the honour of being the specialist HV Perinatal and Infant Mental Health in a strategic role for Best Start, Community Health and Wellbeing Service.

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