BLISS Award presented to Antrim Area Hospital Neonatal Unit

The Northern Health and Social Care Trust is proud to announce that the Neonatal Unit at Antrim Area Hospital has been awarded the BLISS Charter Silver Award for the first time.

The award recognises the unit’s ongoing commitment to nurturing positive partnerships with families, ensuring parents are actively involved in their baby’s care, both practically and through shared decision-making.

Explaining more, Shirley Montgomery, Lead Nurse Paediatrics and Neonatology, said: “Evidence shows that outcomes for babies are improved when parents and carers are partners in their baby’s care so it is vital that our staff foster positive relationships with parents.

“Achieving BLISS Baby Charter Silver Award is an esteemed marker of quality which everyone at the Neonatal Unit is very proud of. It reflects our staff’s continued efforts to provide compassionate, collaborative, and high-quality neonatal care.

“Family Integrated Care (FICare) is at the heart of everything we do. By adopting this partnership approach we actively listen to carers and families to ensure we understand and respond to their needs, which in turn helps us to provide the best possible care for our babies and those closest to them.”

The BLISS award focuses on aspects of family integrated care that matter most to families and babies, and which reflect the potential of FICare to tackle inequalities in neonatal care, including:

• Hands-on care – parents and carers providing comfort and care directly to their babies
• Decision making – parents and carers fully and actively involved in care planning and decision making
• Individualised care – parents and carers’, and families’ needs are listened-to, understood and responded to.
• Tackling barriers – recognising and working to tackle the barriers parents and carers face to being partners in care.
• Service-user voice – creating opportunities for practice to develop based on understanding the lived experience of diverse families.

The Neonatal Unit has now been recommended to progress to the BLISS Charter’s gold level, which it will work towards over the next few months.

 

Pictured above left to right, Suzie Forbes, Enhanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner, Kathie Dobbin, Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner and Jackie Quigg, Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner, who lead the BLISS Charter Silver Award initiative within Antrim Area Hospital’s Neonatal Unit.

29th May 2025