Supporting vulnerable parents and babies to build bonds, break cycles and stay together
Monday, 17 November 2025
Building Attachment and Bonds Service (BABS)
Across Cheshire and Merseyside, the Building Attachment and Bonds Service (BABS) has demonstrated what neighbourhood health and care integration looks like.
BABS has invested in growing services grassroots up alongside families, partners, and leaders with shared goals and accountability to deliver integrated services that make a ‘real’ difference to the most vulnerable parents and babies.
The service is delivered by Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust and is co-located within the Family Hubs across Halton, Knowsley, Sefton, St Helens and Warrington.
In areas of deprivation, lower life expectancy, high unemployment and poor mental health, parents with the highest inequalities and adverse childhood experiences (ACES) need easy-to-engage, non-judgemental, therapeutic services like BABS to help them build bonds, break cycles and separate out their issues from their baby, which can otherwise pose a risk.
The best place for babies is at home with parents who love them and care for them. The number of babies removed from parents’ care at birth has doubled over the last 10 years. Preventing just one baby from entering care offsets the annual cost of one of the BABS services in the region.
Professor Iain Buchan, University of Liverpool, said:
“BABS is a shining example of system-working – safeguarding and nurturing children and families with great teamwork across organisations. These inputs from Mersey Care are highly effective at preventing the removal of children and helping parents to parent.
“Investment in BABS not only improves the long-term health and social wellbeing of our most vulnerable families, but also eases cost pressures on local authority care for looked-after children. This is an example of mutual aid and joint accountability as an integrated care system. The local flexibility of the BABS teams in different districts also carries important lessons in neighbourhood working.”
Now in its eleventh year, BABS has been recognised nationally as a best practice neighbourhood model and partnership with GPs, social services, early help, midwives, health visitors and community services, invested in putting families first for children and offering babies the best start for life, in the first 1,001 days.
BABS is different to other mental health services as it steps outside the medical and mental health box and offers a strengths-based, psycho-social, safeguarding model of care.
Carmel Doyle, Operational Manager for BABS, explained:
“BABS families highlight that life’s issues don’t fit into defined categories, and by offering an attachment and trauma-informed approach, we can strengthen parents, build trust and resilience, and help them achieve their goals.”
Dr Lisa Marsland Hall, BABS Clinical Lead and Associate Director for Vulnerable Complex Families, added:
“BABS families’ stories evidence the life-changing outcomes we can achieve as a partnership by safeguarding families’ relationships, mental health, as well as risk.”
The video above is a powerful story which highlights how cared-for parents like Lauren, who have experienced the greatest number of ACES, inequalities, trauma and loss, often end up repeating the same cycles and suffering the social removal of their own children as a result.
Appointing the right specialist and strengths-based parent-infant mental health support, offered at the right time, means they can go on to build the best bonds with their babies, break the toughest life cycles, and – with good support and relationships – achieve their goals and dreams as parents.
Find out more about BABS on the Mersey Care website.