Poland

Launch of NBO Training Site in Poland

It is our great pride and pleasure to inform all of you that this weekend, June 19-20, marks the launch of the NBO Training Site in Poland! It will be launched with the first online training by Karolina Isio-Kurpińska and Bożena Cieślak-Osik, mentored by Kevin Nugent and Joanna Hawthorne. 

Poland has been an NBAS Training Site since 2012, but since learning about NBO and completing the NBO training in Brazelton Centre UK, we have dreamt of bringing NBO to Polish practitioners. In recent years, after we have established Fundacja Centrum NBAS w Polsce, we started our journey towards becoming NBO trainers and making NBO known and popular in Poland. Before the training we did a lot of publicity in social media and among practitioners to popularize the idea of “Giving babies voice and supporting families from the start”. 

We both feel honored to be able to pass on the knowledge and skills to Polish practitioners and hope that the 2021 training will be just the first step on the road to making NBO a part of perinatal care system in Poland. We are eager and enthusiastic, so we MUST succeed! 

We would like to thank everyone at the Brazelton Institute for their help and support along the way, but also the whole international NBO community. Our online meetings in the year of pandemics have been a source of so much inspiration, and the opportunity to exchange thoughts and experiences with you made us feel much more confident in our endeavor. On behalf of ourselves, but also Polish practitioners and most importantly Polish babies and their families - a huge thank you all for your continuing help, support and encouragement! 

Karolina Isio-Kurpińska and Bożena Cieślak-Osik

2020 brought with it a challenge none of us expected: the Covid pandemics forced the whole societies into social isolation. We were trying to face the challenge in various areas, both as NBAS Trainers and as allies to parent-infant relationships. 

We managed to organize one in-person NBAS training in February. When lockdown started we focused on supporting parents and babies suffering because of pandemic consequences: organizing online support to parents preparing for delivery, mothers faced with the perspective of delivering babies without their partners. Since as an organization we cooperate with a university obstetric and neonatology clinic, we decided to support parents of preterm infants in the NICU who were not able to visit their babies: the hospital staff would send the parents daily photos of their infants and we bought recording devices, on which parents could record their voices which would then be played to their baby. It was a small step which helped parents feel more connected and have some agency. 

Lockdown forced all of us to be more active online and we feel we made good use of that. We benefited immensely from weekly international NBAS/NBO Trainer meetings, which also sped up the process of becoming the NBO Training site - we are hoping to sign the agreement shortly. We organized two online NBAS trainings and one „refresher meeting” and we received very positive feedback from participants. We also started Facebook and Instagram accounts of our organization, and two Facebook groups - one addressed to NBAS practitioners and one to parents. 

We are now finalizing the process of becoming the NBO training site and hope that 2021 will be NBO year in Poland.