How should frontline health professionals be sharing DadPad information?

Having invested in DadPad resources within an NHS or local authority area, it’s important to then use these resources in the optimum way, in order to maximise the benefits that you, your teams and the families you support will gain from this investment.  This is something that we at DadPad are always keen to support commissioners and professionals with, and so we thought it might be helpful to put together a short series of blog posts which can be used to help with this.

In this blog, we’re going to be looking at our main bundle of DadPad resources which most commissioners purchase – i.e. the DadPad, the Quick Read DadPad and the DadPad app – and will offer best practice guidance on how frontline professionals should be using these with the families, couples and individuals that they come into contact with.

Focusing on the app

The first thing to be aware of is that the DadPad app – if it’s been commissioned for your area – should be the primary resource that your frontline healthcare professionals share with each and every expectant (and new) family that they meet.  The app has been designed in partnership with the commissioning team for each area, to ensure that – as well as containing a wide range of general information on all aspects of expectant and new fatherhood, from baby care to bonding, midwives to mental health, and much more – there are links, contact information and signposting to a whole host of both local and national support groups, organisations and charities on a huge range of topics which could be pertinent to new families.  Topics typically covered include:

• local NHS hospitals and health visitor team information;
• local and national support for and information on perinatal and other mental health difficulties;
• local and national sources of support relating to breastfeeding;
• information on antenatal and maternity services, sexual health and contraceptive services, and financial support services; and
• local and national support groups for dads/men, mums/women, young parents, single/separated parents, families coping with SEND, families with a baby in neonatal care, bereaved families, and BAME families.

The app also has the capacity to send out news alerts to all dads who have downloaded it within an area, which again enables commissioners and healthcare professionals to bring local events, services and health promotions – for example – to the attention of a huge range of local families very quickly and easily.

Information on downloading the app can be provided to dad in a number of different ways, including:

• via our DadPad-produced marketing materials – including stickers, posters and ‘business cards’, all of which contain the basic information that dads need in order to download the app. The stickers and cards have been designed to be used by frontline healthcare professionals at antenatal appointments – either with or without dad.  Where dad is there, the information can act as an aide memoire, reminding him of the information that he needs to download when he gets home; where dad is not there, the information demonstrates to him that he was thought about and mentioned at the antenatal appointment, and that there is something special, just for him.  The intention of the stickers is for them to be used within areas where expectant mums still have paper-copies/hand-held pregnancy notes, whereas the cards can be used where pregnancy notes are kept electronically.  A sample bundle of materials would have been sent out to each commissioning contact prior to launch of each new DadPad app area, but do get in touch with us at DadPad if you’d like to get some for yourself – we’re happy to send out sample bundles to individual healthcare teams, and can then quote (at cost price) for provision of further supplies;
• providing your own information with links to downloading the app – for example, on websites, social media, and via flyers etc. The team at DadPad are happy to liaise with individual areas on this, and to provide/approve suitable wording, images and logos etc;
• share the link to our app download page from our website: https://thedadpad.co.uk/app/; and/or
• get dad to search for ‘DadPad’ in the relevant app store for his phone or tablet.

Optimum use of the hard copies

When we wrote and designed our hard copy DadPads, we had several aims in mind, including:

• to provide new dads and dads-to-be with the knowledge and practical skills that they would need in order to be able to support themselves and their partner, in order to give their baby the best start in life;
• to help and enable dads to: reduce their anxiety by getting involved with hands-on baby care; gain confidence in their new role; learn how to create a strong bond and healthy attachment with their baby; build a stronger family relationship by sharing the load and learning how to parent together; and recognise the signs of postnatal depression, and other perinatal mental ill-health, in themselves and/or their partner, and learn how to get help early;
• to assist frontline healthcare professionals engage and build positive relationships with new dads and dads-to-be; and
• to boost dad’s confidence by making him feel valued, included and involved as both a parent and an individual.

These latter two aims are potentially more specific to the hard copy DadPad books, as opposed to the app version.  As we’ll explore in a separate blog post in due course, there are a range of advantages in having a tangible, ‘real’ book and pages to learn from and engage with, as opposed to accessing the information via a screen.  For example:

• there is evidence that it’s easier to understand and remember information that you’ve read on a page, rather than a screen, potentially because “touching paper and turning pages aids the memory, making it easier to remember where you read something” [ref 1];
• having a hard copy DadPad provides the opportunity for the frontline healthcare professional to sit alongside the expectant or new dad, looking at and talking over the pages together.  Sitting alongside someone also offers great potential to gently start a deeper conversation, perhaps about the dad’s worries or fears around parenthood, or his mental health.  We considered this in more detail in our How do I start a conversation around mental health? blog:

• providing dad with something of his own, written just for him, which he can keep and use, can be a real boost to the dad, helping him feel valued and important in his own right. This, in turn, gives the potential to start building a trusting and positive relationship between dad and the perinatal professional(s). We know, from anecdotal feedback, how delighted a number of new dads have been when handed their DadPad – especially the younger dads, the more vulnerable dads… the dads with whom we can all really make a difference.

Therefore, it’s important to consider what you are going to do with your hard copy DadPads.  We know, for example, that a number of areas have provided their frontline healthcare professionals with their own ‘demonstration model’ DadPad to show to the families that they work with, but are not handing many out.  This is not ideal and means that some of the many advantages that giving dad his own copy to keep are being missed out on.

Whilst we appreciate that the cost implication means that it’s not practical to be able to give each and every new dad their own DadPad, perhaps consider whether there is a cohort of expectant dads who you want to ensure get their own copies? All first-time dads, maybe, or all dads-to-be under a certain age, or living in a specific (more deprived) locality within your area?