What is a Pre Birth Assessment?
The vulnerability of expectant parents can sometimes mean that safeguarding worries are identified during pregnancy. As part of the safeguarding support offered and to assist planning a pre birth assessment can be undertaken. This is usually completed by a social worker.
The purpose of the assessment is to identify strengths, needs and risks which can then help inform decision making and planning for the family and baby. Whilst it is a social worker’s responisbility to do a pre-birth assessment with a family, they are key to a wider multi-agency responsibility. Agency practitioners have important information to contribute and the assessment influences any plan put in place which is supported by a multi agency team of key people in a child and familiy’s life.
The NSPCC have a really helpful podcast on pre birth assessments which you can listen to here INSERT LINK
Our local Plymouth learning…
Rapid Reviews in Plymouth have highlighted some key practice strengths and areas for development in relation to pre-birth assessments. They focus around 4 key points:
1. Being male inclusive
2. How pre-birth assessments influence support plans
3. The importance of involving multi agency practitioners in Child in Need meetings
4. Embedding safer sleep and coping with crying messages
Let’s take a look at these points in more detail below….
Being Male Inclusive
Understandably our attention can focus on the female parent as the person who is pregnant. However as with all our support we need to be thinking ‘whole family.’ Our Plymouth learning on pre-birth assessments tells us that we are very thorough in considering the needs of female carers and how their current and previous circumstances may influence future parenting. We are not so focused on this when it comes to male carers. So, any pre-birth assessment should consider the whole family and in particular male carers. This includes considering previous trauma or current mental health issues and what this means for the care of future children. This may therefore involve adult mental health services in any pre-birth planning.
How pre birth assessments influence support plans
Having highlighted the need for pre-birth assessments to be comprehensive and take a whole family approach it’s also crucial that they then influence support plans. The task of ‘doing’ a pre-birth assessement can become of little value if we then don’t use what it’s telling us to influence the support offerred and multi-agency planning for the baby and family. So, be analytical in our thinking of pre-birth assessments. For example, we may have identified an issue with prescribed medication for substance misuse so what is that going to mean for the daily routine of the baby when it arrives….are there times of the day that parents are going to be more responsive than others etc?
The importance of involving multi agency practitioners in Child in Need meetings
We’ve talked about taking a whole family approach and it’s equally important to take a whole system approach. That is to say that following a pre-birth assessessment and when a Child In Need Plan is in place, lt’s helpful for families for us to be thinking who needs to attend Child in Need meetings and help support the plan. Of course this needs to be a conversation with the parents however our local learning highlighted that not all professionals who could have contributed positively to a Child in Need Plan were actively engaged.