Women & Infants Introduces Center for Children and Families

Women & Infants Hospital announces the opening of the Center for Children and Families, located at 50 Holden Street in Providence, offering behavioral health services across developmental stages of the family.  The staff in the Center for Children and Families provides integrated care across psychology, psychiatry and clinical social work to support adults and children.

The Center for Children and Families is closely aligned with the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, which has been conducting research and providing services on infant development and behavior issues since 1991 – first as Women & Infants’ Infant Development Center and, since 2005, as the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk. 

“For more than two decades, our mission has been to stimulate outstanding interdisciplinary research, education and clinical services on the biological and social factors that determine the developmental outcome of at-risk children,” said Barry M. Lester, PhD, director of the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk and of Women & Infants’ Center for Children and Families.  “In that time, the depth and breadth of our clinical services has grown tremendously.  The Center for Children and Families is a natural offshoot, enabling us to further integrate our commitment to training, learning and clinical care.”

Services in Women & Infants’ Center for Children and Families include:

• Perinatal, Postpartum and Infancy Services – The Center offers individual adult services to support women during the perinatal and postpartum periods through outpatient behavioral health services, as well as services during infancy around sleep and regulatory difficulties.
  • Working collaboratively with Women & Infants’ Center for Women’s Behavioral Health, services for women support their needs around mood and anxiety disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period.
  • The Infant Behavior, Cry and Sleep Clinic is a one-of-a-kind clinical service for infants with crying, colic sleep, feeding and behavior concerns.
  • The Infant Toddler Sleep Service works with parents to treat infant/toddler sleep problems and develop healthy sleep habits.
  • The NICU Family Psychosocial Health Service provides family-based mental health services for the parents of infants who must spend time in Women & Infants’ Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).
• Early Childhood Services – Early childhood services focus both on diagnostic evaluations and child and family therapy.  Diagnostic services provide support to families around identifying and clarifying early behavioral and developmental disorders. 
  • The Occupational Therapy Consult Service provides family-based developmental assessment and consultation for high-risk infants in the NICU at Women & Infants Hospital and outpatient follow-up assessment and intervention for infants with specific feeding or developmental concerns.
  • The Healthy Early Relationship Program (HER) focuses on strengthening the parent-child relationship in order to promote child development and health family functioning.
  • The Behavior and Development Clinic serves infants, toddlers and preschool age children with behavioral, developmental, and/or emotional concerns.
  • The Neurobehavioral Consult Service provides neurobehavioral assessments of at-risk infants.
  • The Center also provides child/family therapy to families with children age five and younger who are facing challenges that may include parental mental health needs, perinatal substance use, extended hospitalizations, out-of-home placement, or other situations that may cause disruptions in the parent-child relationship.
• Autism Spectrum Disorders Services – The Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) Clinic offers services to children of a broad age range with ASD or a parental concern for an ASD.  Services for families include diagnostic and behavioral assessments, psychiatric consultation for behavioral and/or emotional concerns related to an ASD diagnosis, and child and family therapy to optimize the strengths and capacities for families and their children. Our multidisciplinary team includes staff who specialize in child psychiatry, psychology and clinical social work.

Women & Infants’ Center for Children and Families is located at 50 Holden Street in Providence.  For information, visit womenandinfants.org/centerforchildrenandfamilies or call (401) 274-1122, extension 8935. 

About Women & Infants Hospital

Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, a Care New England hospital, is one of the nation’s leading specialty hospitals for women and newborns.  The primary teaching affiliate of The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University for obstetrics, gynecology and newborn pediatrics, as well as a number of specialized programs in women’s medicine, Women & Infants is the eighth largest stand-alone obstetrical service in the country with nearly 8,400 deliveries per year.  In 2009, Women & Infants opened what was at the time the country’s largest, single-family room neonatal intensive care unit.  

New England’s premier hospital for women and newborns, Women & Infants and Brown offer fellowship programs in gynecologic oncology, maternal-fetal medicine, urogynecology and reconstructive pelvic surgery, neonatal-perinatal medicine, pediatric and perinatal pathology, gynecologic pathology and cytopathology, and reproductive endocrinology and infertility.  It is home to the nation’s only mother-baby perinatal psychiatric partial hospital, as well as the nation’s only fellowship program in obstetric medicine.

Women & Infants has been designated as a Breast Center of Excellence from the American College of Radiography; a Center for In Vitro Maturation Excellence by SAGE In Vitro Fertilization; a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence by the National Institutes of Health; and a Neonatal Resource Services Center of Excellence.  It is one of the largest and most prestigious research facilities in high risk and normal obstetrics, gynecology and newborn pediatrics in the nation, and is a member of the National Cancer Institute’s Gynecologic Oncology Group and the National Institutes of Health’s Pelvic Floor Disorders Network.