I am a health nurse, and both in Denmark and abroad I have worked with infants, first in the hospital service and later in the homes and local areas of families with young children.
Already in my early days as a health nurse, I became aware that some children needed help to cope with their developmental needs. But I lacked validated tools to identify these vulnerable children. And I also lacked research-based knowledge about how children and their parents could be helped so that we as health nurses, in collaboration with the parents, can prevent serious developmental complications in the child and undesirable burdens for the family.
It has led me into the world of research and to a PhD thesis in which I validated a method for a systematic study of the psychological development of infants in the field of healthcare. The method is called PUF, which stands for psychological development and function (Danish: ‘Psykisk Udvikling og Funktion’), and together with researchers of infants and a number of health nurses, I have developed the PUF programme for the basic measures in healthcare. Our research and my teaching have shown that the PUF programme serves as the important first step in a systematic detection of and measure targeting mental vulnerability in infants. However, the most vulnerable children and their parents need special efforts, and it has therefore been important for me both to get acquainted with the VIPP method and to help develop the VIPP-PUF initiative, which we are now testing in Infant Health.