The AiMH UK Infant Mental HealthCompetency Framework (IMHCF)

The Infant Mental Health Competency Framework (IMHCF) was created by AiMH UK and in partnership with the International Training School for Infancy and Early Years, and was officially launched in the House of Commons in May 2019.  It has been informed by research, theory and evidence-based practice, and designed to raise standards of care for families by supporting all students and staff to optimize their learning skills.

Developed to standardise competencies for infant mental health practice, the IMHCF provides a comprehensive structure for identifying and developing the knowledge, skills, and reflective capacities essential for supporting healthy early relationships and emotional development.

Competencies are the skills, knowledge and behaviours that enable both trainee and trained practitioners to deliver high quality care and the continuous improvement to services.

Building on this foundation, the IMHCF was reorganised into the IMH Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Programme, which was launched in 2022. The Programme offers a structured, flexible pathway for professionals across the early years, health, social care, and allied sectors to deepen their IMH practice, and is designed to support learning and reflection at different stages of professional development.

The IMH CPD Programme is for all students and staff working with infants and their parent/s/caregiver from pregnancy to the second year of life, and who support parent/s/ and/or caregiver to promote healthy infant development.

The IMHCF aims to:

• • help us to maintain an infant mental health frame of mind, thereby enabling us as practitioners to consider both the perspective of the baby (including the non-verbal infant) and that of the parent. This helps perinatal and IMH students and Practitioners to recognise the parent-infant (P-I) relationship as a dynamic system, and to be able to promote it.

• • helps to ensure the workforce is suitably skilled to identify need and provide support to parent/s/caregiver who are pregnant or have a baby; and to both promote the mental health of the baby and provide access to appropriate evidence-based treatment where there are problems, as outlined in the Healthy Child Programme (DH, 2009;2014)

The IMHCF outlines the competencies that are fundamental to all students and practitioners working with infants and their carers and identifies the competencies practitioners need to be effective in perinatal/infant mental health.

The IMH CPD Programme and the IMHCF have been developed to standardise the competencies – the skills, knowledge and behaviours, for infant mental health practice, that enable practitioners to deliver high quality care and the continuous improvement to services.

The IMH CPD Programme has been designed to help practitioners map their skills, knowledge and experience against the IMHCF, and to build their IMH Portfolio.

Each Level of Expertise is mapped to the IMHCF and supported through reflective CPD activities and portfolio development. This approach enables professionals to build confidence and capacity in IMH while receiving recognition for their growing expertise.