Hello and Welcome

This course is designed to share with you some of the insights gathered from new dads across Kent about their journey to parenthood and to support you to reflect on your role in their care.

Each lesson provides insights into what dads shared with us, with with points for consideration about how these insights could impact your practice. At the end of each Chapter we encourage you to complete the ‘Time to Reflect’ exercise, which is designed to support you to think about how to make change in your own practice.

We recognise that the issues we are faced with day-to-day can feel insurmountable, unchangeable and outside of our realm of influence. We hope that by engaging in these reflections you will recognise the far-from-insignificant impact that you can make on dads and their families’ lives.

These individual reflections are followed by some reflective points that are focussed on the wider system in which you work and live. You alone cannot be held responsible for the way things around you happen, however you do play a part. By providing space for some wider reflection, we hope to support you to evaluate and re-evaluate how things are done and to encourage others around you to do the same, because there is always another way to do things if we can take the time to stop and reflect. Or, in the words of A.A. Milne:

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.”

The Chapter entitled ‘Get Practical’, instead of providing reflection points, provides you with a list of suggested exercises to complete. These exercises are aimed at putting learning into action to transform services.

Throughout the course we really encourage you to think about each and every contact with a dad. To make the most of what we already have it is important that we think about who has the power to transform a dad’s experience. First contacts really matter and so we feel that it is crucial to have support staff such as receptionists, administrators, security workers and others involved in this process.

Aims and Objectives

Dads told us that they wanted people completing this course to:

• Have a better understanding of how to interact with dads and to feel more confident in having these interactions

• Have better knowledge about what information dads wanted to have access to and how they wanted to access it

• Think more carefully about how to include dads in services and make services accessible to dads.