Nottingham Toddler Lab

Research into Perceptual and Cognitive Development

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The Preterm Infant Parenting Study

Approximately 14,000 babies are born more than 8 weeks premature each year in the UK, and around 3,000 of these will go on to have developmental or behavioural difficulties later in life. These problems may be caused by inadequate interaction between parents and their very premature child, and are associated with a high rate of stress and depression felt by mothers over their baby’s first year.

Previous research studies have shown that developmental care interventions designed to improve parent-baby interaction and to provide support for parents of very preterm babies may provide short-term benefits for the infants’ development. However, more detailed research is needed in this area to find out how effective these interventions are in the longer-term, and whether they are also beneficial to mothers’ well being.

The Parent Baby Interaction Programme (PBIP) is one such intervention. It is a parent-focussed programme of parental support provided by nurses from birth through to six weeks after discharge from hospital. It is designed to improve parent-baby interaction and to enhance parent’s confidence in taking care of their developing baby. The PIP Study is designed to look at the effectiveness of this PBIP programme as an intervention for very premature babies and their parents.

The research team aim to find out whether the PBIP programme:

• Improves parent-baby interaction
• Improves mother’s well-being in the short-term
• Improves infants’ development in the longer-term
• Is cost-effective

The Study is now being carried out in Bristol, Gloucester, Leicester, and Nottingham. Approximately 240 babies who were born more then 8 weeks premature are taking part in the study. All the families have kindly agreed to let us visit them when their premature baby is discharged from hospital and again when he or she is two years old. As the study will end when all of the babies reach two years of age the results will be available in the Summer of 2006.

The PIP study research team is made up of a variety of health professionals and psychologists, some of whom you may meet here at the Nottingham Toddler lab (Professor Neil Marlow & Dr Samantha Johnson).
The PIP Study is generously funded by a PPP Healthcare grant to Professor Andrew Whitelaw & Mrs Chrissie Israel (Bristol), Professor Neil Marlow & Dr Cris Glazebrook (Nottingham). For more information about the PIP Study and the research team please see the PIP Study web site.