WAIMH has over the past three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, provided support and resources to those who work with infants and their families. At the end of 2022, WAIMH began to broaden this focus to infants all over the world who face various humanitarian and environmental crises beyond the pandemic. Aligned with this focus, is this new WAIMH webpage: Infants in Crises.
WAIMH as a global community comprises colleagues from diverse regions, including colleagues living in areas within current crises. This Infants in Crises page, is intended to be a support resource for any professional who is in a position to lend their minds to infants and their families in crises. It is also intended to be a resource for professionals to also become advocates for our colleagues working amidst and within crises contexts, to be voices for babies, and to be agents of change for families whose physical, emotional, and psychological safety are at risk.
Many countries saw in the new year with hope and optimism, with the biggest crisis of the past three years, COVID-19 finally loosening its grip on hard lockdowns, economic decline, and human mortality. There will no doubt need to be continued work, especially in the field of mental health to recover from this pandemic which impacted every person on the planet in some shape or form. Despite its devastating impact, the pandemic also allowed the world to focus on the discrepancies of resources that exist between different parts of the world. Those parts of the world in which face crises of war, political unrest, environmental disasters and with it the displacement of populations have suffered and continued to do so most greatly by the pandemic.
This page comprises free and open-access resources. It also functions as a compliment to the work of the WAIMH Infants in Crises working group. This WAIMH working group, led by President Elect Professor Astrid Berg, aims to develop systems and people-focused relationships within the WAIMH global professional community, that directly function to support colleagues working with infants in crises contexts. There are plans for the working group to have an in-person meeting during the upcoming WAIMH Congress in Dublin, July 2023.
The link to the webpage is here: https://waimh.org/page/infants_in_crises
Authors
Maree Foley, Editor-in-Chief, Switzerland
Salisha Maharaj, Assistant Editor, South Africa
