National Centre for Supervision of Parent-Infant Relationships

Introduction: 

Through the 2021-2025 Family Hubs and Start for Life programme, funding was allocated to the 75 participating local authorities to improve access for families to bespoke parent-infant relationship support. The vast majority of this funding went directly to 75 programme LAs and a small proportion of the budget was held centrally to develop a series of national initiatives to support delivery.  As part of this, funding was allocated to the development and delivery of a National Centre for Supervision of Parent-Infant Relationships that provided local authorities with access to specialist parent-infant relationship clinical supervision where there wasn’t capacity or capability locally.  The National Centre has been a great success, and we are looking to continue the delivery through the DHSC funded element of the Best Start Family Hub and Healthy Babies Programme. 

Background: 

Good parent-infant relationship support is underpinned by a knowledgeable, skilled and confident workforce. This funding will enable the workforce to have the capacity and capability to support families with parent-infant relationship difficulties. Ensuring the workforce is appropriately supervised will be essential. 

There is a need for greater capacity of clinical supervision for parent-infant relationship support  

Clinical supervision is an essential part of working therapeutically. We know that local authorities do not have clinical expertise in parent-infant relationships. One of the main challenges to rapidly expanding parent-infant relationships support is access to clinical supervisors with expertise in parent-infant relationships.   

Supervision is fundamental to good clinical governance, ensuring safe and effective delivery of care. In this context, supervision is a place for practitioners to:    

• Seek support, advice, and guidance on how to manage their clinical work. This might include care planning or delivering specific therapeutic interventions.   

• Reflect on the impact of their clinical work on themselves, preventing burnout and promoting reflective practice.   

• Learn more about ways of supporting babies and their families. This might include technical knowledge sharing (e.g., how a baby’s stress response system develops) or sharing therapeutic process (e.g., how to contain psychological distress in therapeutic sessions).    

The scope and scale of investment in parent-infant support will vary across 75 local areas depending on local needs, system provision and workforce pressures. Therefore identifying, monitoring and responding to local demand for parent-infant supervision will be crucial element of the grant funding. 

Requirement: 

DHSC is seeking to secure the services of a supplier to create and run a National Centre for Supervision of Parent-Infant Relationships. The National Centre will be expected to provide clinical supervision to 75 local authorities receiving DHSC funding to deliver Best Start in Life Healthy Babies services. The successful supplier will be expected to manage the grant funding in its entirety, from designing and establishing the service, delivering clinical supervision sessions through to evaluating the impact of the intervention. 

In designing and implementing the service, the supplier should consider the following key deliverables: 

• Exploring and understanding the needs of eligible LAs: Using the grant funding, the supplier will look to build an understanding of the clinical supervision requirements of the eligible LAs and maintain this understanding over the course of the funded period. 

• Staffing: The supplier will be required to develop and deliver a staffing model that supports the delivery of clinical supervision to meet the requirements of the eligible LAs. 

• Clinical Supervision: The supplier will be required to deliver or facilitate the delivery of clinical supervision sessions in accordance with the needs assessment. We are keen for suppliers to explore innovative ways to deliver clinical supervision sessions to a variety of practitioners but, as a minimum, they must: 

• Cover a wide range of parent-infant relationship interventions, including VIG 

• Meet the supervision needs of a wide range of practitioners including the supervisors themselves 

• Be able to be deliver flexibly, for example online and group sessions 

We would also expect suppliers to evidence the quality and impact of clinical supervision delivery over the course of the funding period. 

• Community and Learning: The supplier will be expected to develop a community amongst supervisees and supervisors that provides materials and learning opportunities around parent-infant relationships and the role of supervision to support practitioners in their learning and development through their use of the centre 

• Communication: The supplier is expected to have a thorough communications plan for raising awareness of the National Centre across the eligible local authorities.  

• Continuous Improvement: The supplier will be expected to continuously monitor and evaluate the impact of the National Centre over the course of the funded period and regularly provide updates to the Department with suggestions for continuous improvement. The supplier will also be expected to provide a full evaluation of the National Centre at the end of the funded period that sets out the impact of the support. 

Expected Demand: 

Demand for supervision from eligible LAs is likely to vary depending on local circumstances. The current National Centre provides supervision to 48 of the 75 eligible LAs to over 200 practitioners. Any supplier should be able to generate capacity to deliver supervision to all 75 eligible LAs should there be demand for this.