Clinical Services

 

What is the Infant Clinic?


The Infant Clinic provides a service to explore and help with the difficulties experienced by parent(s) of an infant in distress. Treatment plans are individually tailored to include a range of approaches found to help early parenting difficulties and infant adjustment. These draw from educational, supportive, movement, psychodynamic and cognitive behavioural therapies. The service has a part-time team consisting of psychologists and a dance therapist. Paediatric and psychiatric consultation is arranged when required.
As such, the Infant Clinic aims to work with this target population in order to:


  • Help parents deal with stress and difficulties they experience when raising their infant, and to develop together alternative ways of managing the problem and relieving the stress;
  • Maximize the child's future development, through early assessment and intervention;
  • Provide consultation to professionals about methods of working with and helping parents and infants and
  • Provide a specialized assessment service to other agencies who maintain case management responsibilities.
 

Location, Fees and Contacts


High quality, responsive services are available at affordable rates to anyone who is prepared to travel to the Infant Clinic which is located on the Repatriation Campus of Austin Health. Fees for service provided by the clinic can be negotiated with the therapist. Some treatment through our research program is free of charge to the client. The Heidelberg Private Infant Clinic is a privatized arm of our service supported by HBA, which pays full benefits for all members who use the clinic.
A map showing the location of the Infant Clinic can be viewed by clicking here.

Who can attend the Infant Clinic?


Anyone can attend. We accept self-referral for any parent or family with an infant who:


  • Feels burdened by the demand of being a parent and unable to cope, feels depressed or emotionally troubled;
  • Is worried that their baby is not feeding well or growing as well as expected;
  • Feels that their baby is too fussy or difficult to comfort;
  • Has a baby who has sleeping problems, difficulties around separation or long and frequent temper tantrums;
  • Finds their baby unusually quiet or uninterested in them or;
  • Has developmental problems which place special emotional burdens on the parents;
  • We include those who have more substantial problems such as psychiatric illness, substance abuse, severe attachment and developmental difficulties and postnatal depression. Too often current adult focused treatment does not take into account the impact on infants, nor are there avenues for referral of the more severe infant difficulties.
 

What types of interventions are used?


We provide interventions in the context of:


  • Building social support and network building;
  • Bringing families and extended families together and
  • Integration with other relevant services, e.g. we work closely with Banksia House mother-baby unit at Austin Health.


Our interventions are constantly evolving and being adapted and include:


  • Individual treatments using latest psychological therapies, counselling, cognitive-behavioural therapy and reality-based problem-solving approaches;
  • Couple counselling - interactional & parenting difficulties, infant focused difficulties;
  • Emotional adaptation including dealing with parenting issues in the presence of a psychiatric disorder;
  • Special purpose groups including innovative programs on parent-infant difficulties ? prematurity, bonding, sleep clinics, postnatal depression, teenage parents, father support, social support and networking (including grandparents) and high-risk infants vulnerable to entering protective services.


Premature Babies and their Parents

The Infant Clinic in Heidelberg, Victoria provides the following services for parents and their babies who have been born prematurely


  • PremieHUGS Therapeutic/Early Intervention Playgroups and workshop Learn to help your baby's development using play to provide early ?enrichment?. The programs include activities, ideas, information (and handouts) that are known to help infant development.

  • Premiepress Parents of premature babies consistently seek resources to learn about their babies. This quarterly magazine is written to give parents the knowledge about prematurity issues known to the experts. It also contains parents' stories, which are helpful to those who are trying to deal with all the personal and medical issues that can arise. Cost $40 per year (4 editions)

  • Individual counselling Our team of psychologists and trainee psychologists help parents who find difficulties in the adjustment to parenthood. These include Post-natal depression plus the many other issues that often arise following a premature birth. Cost are calculated on a sliding scale, depending on family income and Medicare rebates apply.


Contact the Infant Clinic on
Tel: (03) 9496 4496
Fax: (03) 9496 4148
Email: carol.newnham@austin.org.au

 

Infant Clinic


The Parent-Infant Research Institute has rigorously developed and evaluated a number of highly effective programs capable of turning around dysfunctional relationships in a brief time (see Box 1), and these are available to young families in our communities. These very early, targeted psychological interventions are designed to deal with problems such as those following postnatal depression and a premature birth or problems such as poor attachment to infants.

 

Current Programs Developed by PIRI

The Getting Ahead of Postnatal Depression - a 12 week rigorously evaluated psychological treatment program to improve maternal mood,Toward Parenthood - a self-help prevention program to minimize perinatal anxiety, depression and attachment difficulties; Beautiful Beginnings for Premature Parents and Infants to decrease the impact of stress on the infant and the Happiness, Understanding, Giving and Sharing (HUGS) and Intuitive Mothering programs, which target parent-infant dyads following postnatal depression as current evidence shows infants are at risk without intervention.

Fathers are a focus of all our treatment programs. Training programs for health care workers include 'Overcoming Depression' a 6 week manualized program for Maternal Child Health Nurses to manage Postnatal Depression, and a General Practitioner assessment, management checklist and screening pack for perinatal depression. In addition extensive workshops on using depression screening tools and primary care management have been developed and offered.

Brochure Downloads:
Adjustment to Parenthood

 



PIRI adopts a broad-based approach involving mothers, fathers and grandparents and includes best practice treatments as well as novel therapeutic approaches such as enhancing the nonverbal communication between mother and infant through dance.

Image.

Collaborative Relationships


Parent-Infant Research Institute (PIRI)

 



PIRI currently collaborates widely including local government and the community sector (e.g. Maternal & Child Health Nurses, Parenting Centres, PanDa), Department of Human Services (high-risk infant program), General Practitioners, maternity and other hospitals, mother-baby units, and has the support of beyondblue , VicHealth and a number of charitable trusts.

 

The Need for a Centre of Excellence for Parents and Infants 0-24 months
? Supporting Key Stakeholders

Image.

A current collaborative project is the Austin Health


Parent-Infant Mental Health Initiative
The aim of the new DHS funded Austin Health Mother-Infant Initiative (North East catchment) is to provide increased support, awareness and professional capacity for managing mothers with mental illness, to assist them to care for their young infants within the critical 6 months after childbirth. The service involves collaboration between Banksia House Mother-Baby Unit and the Infant Clinic. It will provide primary and secondary consultation, education, training, and liaison network development, and will develop capacity within existing public mental health services. In particular, training will be provided to adult public mental health services and CAMHS at Austin, Northern, Eastern Health, St Vincent's and some limited training for country regions in the NE. This initiative looks to ensure holistic perinatal care of women, infants and families in the region and facilitating better links between all relevant existing services.