Celebrating collaborative working

In 2015, Better Start Bradford was set up to support pregnant women and families with children aged under four in Bowling and Barkerend, Bradford Moor and Little Horton. Five years on we have more than 20 projects just doing that.

What is even more wonderful is that our projects are working in collaboration to help support our families. There are many examples, such as our Better Place project works alongside our Forest School Play Project to enhance and enjoy natural play spaces; Better Start Imagine working alongside Better Place to bring family storytelling sessions to the outdoors; and Cooking for a Better Start being a natural progression for parents who have completed the HENRY programme.

In this blog post, we talk to Rachel Duxbury, Breastfeeding Project Co-ordinator, from the Breastfeeding Support Project. Rachel shares how they often identify families who need additional support, wider than their offer, and how they work particularly closely with the Home-Start Better Start project on a referral basis to meet this need.

Rachel says…

We work very closely with the Home-Start Better Start team. The nature of our breastfeeding support work requires us to make contact with, and build supportive relationships, with families in the very early postnatal period. Quite often families will confide in our support staff about other issues they are facing, and we can identify early on when further intervention is required from other projects and services.

As we were helping one mum, Aisha*, we identified that she needed more one-to-one support around issues that were not related to breastfeeding. Ideally, she needed someone to visit her on a weekly basis to support her in the home, so we referred her to Home-Start Better Start.

We have a lot of confidence in the quality of the service that they provide to families and we knew that Aisha would be appropriately supported with her needs. Aisha did look at other projects, but Home-Start Better Start was the best-placed organisation to offer her the practical and emotional support that she needed. Although our team offer some emotional support to mums, Home-Start Better Start have the staff and volunteers with the skills and experience to support families in a different way to us.

We consider it a great asset to be able to refer our parents to Home-Start Better Start and work closely with their volunteers to ensure families are supported in the best way possible.

This type of collaborative working is what Better Start Bradford is all about and families really do benefit from having such a seamless and co-ordinated approach.

To find out how Aisha was helped by Home-Start Better Start read Aisha’s blog.

To read about Tanya, the Home-Start Better Start volunteer who supported Aisha, read Tanya’s blog.

*names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.