NICU to EI with the Hospital-to-Home Systems Change Team

Sarah, do you want to

share? Yeah, of course.

And, like, how did the three of us all come together? I mean, really, this was brewing for so long.

I mean, I think so many people have recognized that this is a huge issue, that families coming home from the NICU are really not adequately supported, that it's a significant service cliff.

And we always say, you know, that term service cliff is most often used for like adults or young adults with disabilities who are kind of leaving the school system.

And in that case, there are no services available.

And I think what's different is for families coming home from the NICU, There are a lot of community services available.

It's just the significant drop off in services because you're going from 24 hour NICU support and having all these monitors and people helping you all the time to nothing.

And And sort of the NICU presumes that the community is going to support you and the community is not, wasn't at the time totally equipped to receive those referrals.

So I would say about, you know, 10 years ago, a lot of people were recognizing this need that both the community needed to better be able to support infant feeding and development and that the emotional wellbeing of parents was sort of the most important piece.

And so we began to come together and start talking and thinking about that.

And then in 2020, we received a grant which enabled us to develop a training, which was a three-day training.

And we made the first day of that training, and it was for community providers and feeding teams.

And we decided that that first day of the training was going to be an introduction to perinatal mental health.

And that was what Leslie did.

And that was very intentional, that we were going to train providers in how to support families after the NICU, but that the foundation of that training was going to be emotional well-being support.

And then we added on to that with the second day being pediatric feeding disorder, and then the third day just adding on as well.

And so that's really where we began to coalesce was around this training to support the community in being able to support families coming home.

Y'all got a grant to do all of this in the middle of a pandemic.

Yeah, to say, like, backtrack there.

I was like, something big was happening in 2020 aside from this.

But like, and did you do the training virtually or in person? Yeah.

We did.

And, you know,

I think that was and I was also pregnant with my third child.