NICU Family Psychosocial Mental-Health Program
Offered by the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Women & Infants Hospital, and Brown University Office of Continuing Education
Instructor(s): Amy Salisbury and Katheleen Hawes
Location: Brown University and Women and Infants' Hospital NICU
Dates: June 1-5, 2009
Meeting Times: 1:00 – 4:00 pm
Fee: $800
Application Due Date: May 8, 2009
Description:
The NICU Family Psychosocial Health Program provides family-based mental health services for parents of the infants who must spend time in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). Referrals are made by the social workers in the NICU. Mental Health services are available during the nursery stay to provide psychiatric, developmental, and behavioral assessment, consultation and intervention for parents. An additional focus of the program is on facilitating parent–infant relationships and parental coping and adjustment. The program supports families and prepares them to take home infants who have spent time in the nursery by helping address their concerns. The service also provides additional support to parents with psychiatric or substance use conditions that might interfere with the caretaking of their infant.
Who should attend: Trainees suitable for this course are graduate level students or professionals in counseling, marital and family therapy, nursing, medicine (including pediatricians and family practitioners), psychiatry, psychology, social work and public health.
Course Objectives: At the completion of the course participants will be able to:
- Discuss the assessment of psychiatric disorders in postpartum women.
- Examine assessment tools for families and infants.
- Discuss maternal mental health issues in this population and family dynamics.
- Examine assessment techniques and clinical interventions with parents of infants in the NICU.
- Demonstrate infant assessment in order to facilitate parent-infant relationships and parental coping and adjustment.
- Analyze individualized family based interventions.
Teaching strategies: Lectures and discussion, live observation
Evaluation:
Observation of clinical interview/interaction skills with the patients
Demonstration of infant assessment
Instructor Bio(s): Dr. Amy Salisbury was trained clinically at the University of Rhode Island as a clinical nurse specialist in child and family psychiatry. She obtained her Ph.D. in developmental psychobiology from the University of Connecticut. Combining these two career paths, Dr. Salisbury’s current clinical work focuses on infant and family psychosocial needs in the context of newborn intensive care, maternal mental illness, and infant and toddler sleep disorders. Her research examines prenatal and postnatal neurobehavioral development within a larger biopsychosocial framework. The long term goal of the research program is to examine why and how children develop mental illness to pinpoint where intervention would be most effective.
Dr. Salisbury heads The Fetal Behavior Studies Program, one of the many clinical research programs within the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, examining fetal and infant neurobehavioral development. Dr. Salisbury and her colleagues have developed an organized method of assessing fetal neurobehavior, called the Fetal Neurobehavior Coding System (FENS) which is currently being used to study the effects of fetal exposure to antidepressant medications, maternal depression, and opiates, and maternal smoking.
Katheleen Hawes is a Psychiatric Clinical Nurse Specialist and adjunct instructor in the College of Nursing at the University of Rhode Island. She coordinates the New NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) Research Study which will compare the medical and neurodevelopmental course from birth through discharge between infants in the open-bay NICU with infants in a single room NICU. It will also determine the role of potential mediating factors such as family centered care, parenting and family factors and staff behavior and attitudes, in explaining differences in those infants. Additionally she is a clinician in the NICU Family Psychosocial Mental-Health Program which provides family based mental health services for parents of the infants who must spend time in the NICU. An additional focus of the program is on facilitating parent–infant relationships and parental coping and adjustment. The program supports families and prepares them to take home infants who have spent time in the nursery by helping address their concerns. Her research interests include nurse-parent interaction and the relationships among nursing practice and infant and parent outcomes.