Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale early attachment service is a parent infant mental health service led by Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust.
We work in partnership with Bury and Rochdale Care Organisation (part of the Northern Care Alliance group), Thinking Ahead (part of the Big Life Group) and Home Start.
We promote the importance of parent and infant mental health and the first relationship an infant has with their parent or carer.
We work with you and your baby during pregnancy, and with you and your babies and young children up until their second birthday.
We can help you if you need support in building your relationship with your baby or young child.
Lots of things can affect how you feel about your baby and yourself. Having a baby or young child can be difficult at the best of times.
Sometimes it can feel hard to cope with a baby’s feeding, sleeping or crying.
Sometimes other things can affect how you feel about your baby, such as depression in pregnancy, or after birth, a traumatic birth, mental health problems, learning needs, events from the past or present, and you may feel worried about some of the feelings you have.
All these problems can affect anyone. We are there to provide extra support so that your relationship is a strong foundation for your future lives.
We will try to offer you an appointment within three weeks of the referral being made.
You’ll have a number of appointments with one of our clinicians, to talk through your problems and concerns, and we’ll work out together what sort of help will be most appropriate for you and your baby or child.
We also offer training and consultation to other professionals and services to help them support families they are working with.
We might talk to you about making a referral to our parent-infant mental health colleagues in your local perinatal community mental health team, Home-Start or Thinking Ahead.
Any professional can refer a parent, carer or infant to us. Referrals are made through the Healthy Young Minds single point of access - 0161 856 4324.
We'd welcome any queries from professionals to see if we can help a family. You can contact us directly on 0161 716 2873 or pcn-tr.hmreasadmin@nhs.net.
If you complete our single point of access referral form then we will contact you to discuss the family.
You can also find more info about how to support families in this document: Parent infant mental health pathway.
We've set up a Facebook group to share helpful information for you and your baby. It's open to anyone so please feel free to join:
Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale early attachment service on Facebook
If you're on Twitter, you can also follow Sarita from our team:
We want to make sure that local colleagues (in Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale) have the knowledge, skills and confidence to promote and support parent infant mental, for the families living in the area.
We have a growing range of training and development opportunities on offer. Many of these can be booked via our Eventbrite page.
Please take a look and get involved. It’s always great to get together with colleagues to think about how we can support local babies and their parents and carers.
Your Baby and You has been written by families and professionals together, with information, videos and things to help you to get to know and understand your baby.
Take your time to read through the content during pregnancy, and remember to revisit it following birth.
We have also developed some materials with more information about the service, click the links below to view or download a copy:
Frequently asked questions
Someone from the service will get in touch with you, or the person who referred you, within a few days and meet with you within three weeks.
Absolutely! Babies start responding to the world around them while still in the womb.
Just like adults they get sad, scared and lonely, but don’t have words yet to let us know. They communicate these emotions in other ways such as crying, not being able to settle, not being able to feed, switching off/sleeping a lot.
Sometimes it’s hard to tune into your baby’s emotions and that’s something we can help you with.
In short, no. Becoming a parent is a life changing experience for all involved; dads, partners and other caregivers are as equally important to the baby as mum is.
Dads, partners and other caregivers can experience hormone and brain changes, have often shared stressful times in their journey to parenthood (whether that’s by pregnancy and childbirth, adoption or another path), and generally had their world turned upside down. It makes sense that many dads, partners and other caregivers struggle with feeling low, anxious or stressed.
Babies need all their caregivers to look after their mental health and wellbeing, so they can build those healthy relationships that we know are needed for healthy brain and good mental health.
Once we receive a referral, one of our practitioners will get in touch with you or the person that referred you to get some more information.
We will decide together which area of the service would be the best to support you and what that support should look like.
After this, we will think about your goals and how we will work towards them. We will review our work together and, with your consent, we will provide update letters to you and other key people involved (e.g GP, health visitor).
Alternatively, if we think another service will be better able to support you we will support you in accessing this.
Of course, we are all about babies and their mums, dads and carers.
There might be times when it is helpful to meet without your baby and we can think together about how we do this.
Some of you may have heard of the specialist perinatal community mental health team, which is separate to us.
They work across Greater Manchester and are provided by Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust.
The perinatal community mental health team supports women who experience high-risk mental health problems during and after pregnancy, and for their infant up to the age of one year.
There are many similarities between our services and we often support the same families. We share many specialist skills and knowledge of perinatal and infant mental health, meaning that both services are able to offer wide range of support.
The are some differences between our services, with the main one being that we are better placed to support more complex parent-infant relationship struggles or complex infant mental health concerns; while they are better placed to support high-risk perinatal mental health problems experienced by mothers.
If you are not sure which service is most suitable for you or a family’s needs, then we would be happy to think about this with you. You can contact us on 0161 716 2873 or pcn-tr.hmreasadmin@nhs.net