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New Certificate Program Links Nursing
Research to Infant Mental Health

Nursing professor Kathryn Barnard observes an infant in a neonatal intensive care unit.

Recent research from the University of Washington shows that mental illness is now the leading cause of hospitalization for children age 5 to 19 in Washington state. But waiting until mental illnesses such as depression or conduct disorders reach the crisis stage can have ramifications far beyond the emergency room, affecting schools, neighborhoods, and our juvenile justice system. Is it possible to identify such children early on? What can be done to help before serious problems develop?

Enter Kathryn Barnard, an internationally-recognized nurse researcher who in 1971 was a young nursing faculty member crafting an independent doctoral degree on the ecology of early child development. So impressive were her findings that she was commissioned by the National Institutes of Health to broadcast her rating scale for measuring child-parent interactions over communications satellite. Called N-CAST (Nursing Child Assessment Satellite Training), her work became the basis for understanding the contextual basis of early growth and development and has been used to train over 20,000 nurses and other health care professionals around the world.

N-CAST "changed the way people see children," says Family and Child Nursing Department Chair Kristen Swanson. "Children are now viewed in terms of their relationship to their parents. This fact has reformed the way that pediatrics and many other disciplines are taught."

Today, the research of Barnard, a professor of nursing since completing her doctorate in 1972, promises to once again be trans-formational, but this time in prevention.

Starting this January 2002, a new Graduate Certificate Program in Infant Mental Health "will give participants the knowledge and skills to provide a unique type of therapy," says Barnard. Special emphasis will be placed on children who are at risk due to maternal mental health problems, extreme poverty and homelessness, absence of social supports, parental substance abuse, and related factors. Barnard notes that no other academic program in infant mental health exists in the Pacific Northwest, and less than 10 exist nationwide.

Five core courses developed by the School of Nursing will be taught by a multi-disciplinary faculty. Twenty students will be admitted to the two-year program each academic year and will spend two years completing the certificate. Donna Weston, a developmental psychologist who recently joined the Department of Family and Child Nursing, is director of the program.

"Thinking about babies as a system means you have to use an interdisciplinary approach," says Weston, who notes that pediatricians, child psychologists, social workers and other clinicians can benefit from the program. Coursework is aligned with a closely supervised home-based model of relationship-based therapy coordinated by Marian Birch, a licensed psychologist with 19 years experience in this area. Other faculty are Joanne Solchany, a nursing clinical specialist in infant and child psychiatry and author of Promoting Maternal Mental Health During Pregnancy, and nursing Professor Susan Spieker, whose background is in developmental psychology and attachment. The graduate certificate program will be part of the new Center for Infant Mental Health, which will be formally launched December 13 in the interdisciplinary Center for Human Development and Disability south of the health sciences complex.

By the year 2010, says Barnard, "the state of Washington will be dramatically different in its services to families and children. We will soon be able to minimize future costs to our schools, our social service agencies, and to our mental health services and prison systems."

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