35: Giving birth during a pandemic: what parents experienced and how we’re helping

Our Baby Steps service – a perinatal education programme – has been designed to help prepare people for becoming new parents. Our service ensures the mental health and wellbeing of parents, healthy development of the child and that there’s a positive relationship between the child and parents.We’ve released a new podcast episode that focuses on how we’ve delivered our Baby Steps service with our external partners during the pandemic and what changed. If you're interested in the research we undertook to gather insights and better adapt our services for parents, listen to our bonus episode.Read the podcast transcript on the NSPCC Learning website.💬 About the speakersMichelle Maybury is a project manager at the NSPCC with a key responsibility for all the services currently within our Scale-Up portfolio, including Baby Steps. She has worked in a variety of roles focussed on supporting our development and delivery of services to children and families across the UK and Channel Islands.Julia Mayes is the Baby Steps Implementation Manager at the NSPCC and has over 10 years of experience working in services for children and families. She has worked across various roles in the NSPCC’s service development and impact programme, with a particular focus on services designed to support relationships between parents and infants.Dr Aisling McElearney is Senior Development Researcher and leads research and insights projects within the Development and Impact team at the NSPCC. Before joining the NSPCC 17 years ago, she worked as a teacher and has since then been involved in engaging the voices of children, families and professionals in developing services and evaluating the impact of services.Meredith Russ is the Programme Lead for Baby Steps in Wiltshire. She has facilitated Baby Steps courses in the past and took on her new role this summer. Previously she has worked as a community midwife and most recently holds a safeguarding caseload.📚 Related resources> View the key findings from the implementation evaluation of the Baby Steps serviceIntro/outro music is Lights by Sappheiros