Family-Centered Care Online Course(s) & Continuing Education

Naomi Bar-Yam, PhD, ACSW, has been working in maternal and child health for over 30 years as an educator, researcher, advocate, and writer. She is the immediate past president of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America (HMBANA) and the founding director of Mothers’ Milk Bank Northeast, which provides safe donor milk to hospitals and families throughout the northeastern US. An expert on access to perinatal health care and policies that support breastfeeding, she has been a consultant to the Centers for Disease Control (on a panel that created “The CDC Guide to Breastfeeding Interventions”), to the United States Breastfeeding Committee (developing an issue paper addressed to CEOs and legislators on breastfeeding and the workplace), and to the March of Dimes (developing educational material for women and families who are medically and socially vulnerable to high-risk pregnancy). She also developed a curriculum for hospital personnel about combining breastfeeding with their work. She reviews articles submitted to the Journal of Human Lactation, Breastfeeding Medicine, and other publications related to breastfeeding, milk banking, and access to perinatal child care. As Executive Director of Mothers’ Milk Bank Northeast, she is thoroughly versed in the technical, procedural, and ethical aspects of milk banking. She often speaks at professional conferences, hospital staff trainings, and grand rounds about milk banking and breastfeeding policies.

Kara Wahlin is a licensed marriage and family therapist and art therapist who resides in the Coachella Valley of southern California. After going through the preterm birth of her twin sons William and Elliott, and the subsequent loss of William, Kara made the promise to dedicate her clinical work to helping other families coping with the trauma and loss often wrought by the NICU experience. She developed the website NICU Healing in order to provide free information, couples and individual therapy, and online support to NICU families. Kara uses strengths-based, neuroloscientifically-informed and creative practices to empower her clients to picking up the pieces of their lives and moving forward with their new life stories. She speaks frequently at conferences discussing best clinical practices, and writes for her own as well as other blogs about new ways of coping with mental health issues that come up after traumatic experiences. In her free time, Kara and her son Elliott are art machines and expert hikers, and also spend their time at home with their menagerie of small animals.

After raising three children as a stay-at-home mother, Dr. Phillips received a master’s degree in Developmental Psychology with a focus on mother-infant attachment, became NIDCAP certified as a Preterm Infant Developmental Specialist, and then attended medical school at University of California, Davis. She completed her pediatric residency and neonatology fellowship at Loma Linda University Children's Hospital in S. California and is an attending neonatologist in the Level 4 NICU at the same hospital. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics/Neonatology at Loma Linda University School of Medicine and is Pediatric Department Chair and Medical Director of Neonatal Services at Loma Linda University Medical Center-Murrieta. Dr. Phillips is an International Board-Certified Lactation Consultant, a Fellow of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, and a past president of the National Perinatal Association (NPA). She is currently President of the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), a global non-profit organization with a mission to support healthy infant-parent relationships before and after birth. Her passion is to honor and nurture the earliest connections between babies and their parents.

Anna Axelin’s academic career has included conducting quantitative and qualitative research on maternity and neonatal care in multidisciplinary and international research groups. In the Academic year 2011-2012, she joined the faculty of Department of Family Health Care Nursing in University of California San Francisco for her post-doctoral research. Since 2018, she was appointed as an associated researcher in the Department of International Maternal and Child Health at University of Uppsala in Sweden. In addition to the academic career, she has ten-year working experience as a NICU nurse.
She is leading the Health in Early Life and Parenthood (HELP) research group which aims to promote health and welfare in the early stages of life. Her special research interest is how to keep parents and sick newborns together throughout the infant hospital stay and strengthen their relationship already during pregnancy. Anna Axelin’s other research interests include pain and sleep in neonates, and the implementation of evidence-based practice in maternity and neonatal care with the help information technology.

Madge E. Buus-Frank DNP, APRN-BC, FAAN is a nurse practitioner, healthcare improvement scientists and scholar who has been actively engaged in both providing and improving healthcare for nearly 4 decades. Dr. Buus-Frank joined Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in 1990 as one of the first acute care nurse practitioners in the Intensive Care Nursery where she played a pivotal role in building a team of NNPs to serve the Intensive Care Nursery in Lebanon, Nashua, and Manchester. Madge continues to serve as a clinical faculty member in the Department of Pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and remains invigorated by her clinical practice at the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth (CHaD) where she has practiced for 30+ years.

Dr. Buus-Frank has been an early innovator on the front lines of developing and testing Learning Health Systems focused on coproducing care with patients and families. as well as improving education and research along the way. In 2019 Dr. Buus-Frank joined The Dartmouth Institute as a Senior Scientist. Her implementation science work currently focuses on a partnership between Dartmouth Hitchcock Health and The Dartmouth Institute, to deliver on the DHH strategic plan, called “The Promise.” She is a co-primary investigator leading a team that is testing the impact of a Learning Health System approach to accelerate co-production of care, to improve the experience of care for our patients and our people and our system. The LHS testing is currently underway in the oncology setting and we will be using whole system measures to evaluate the impact of the Learning health system on patient and family outcomes, cost and value, and research, scholarship and education. Additionally Dr. Buus-Frank serves on a TDI team supporting the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation’s growing quality improvement collaborative (Qorus) serving as a ead curriculum consultant.

Dr. Buus-Frank is the immediate past Executive Vice President of the Vermont Oxford Network (VON), one of the world’s largest healthcare data and improvement networks in the world. At VON she collaborated with international faculty to conceptualize, design and executed large-scale multi-center quality improvement collaboratives, and massive on-line courses (MOOCs) , bringing >700 hospitals, states and health systems together to learn, share, measure and improve the quality, safety and value of care. Additionally, Dr. Buus-Frank championed and led the development of partnerships with state perinatal quality improvement collaboratives where she built both the common will and capacity to conduct audits and embrace e-based educational implementation packages allowing VON to scale the learning from center level improvement to achieve population-wide results using robust on-line educational technology and learning programs.

Dr. Buus-Frank was the Founding Editor-in-Chief for Advances in Neonatal Care: The Official Journal of the National Association of Neonatal Nurses, a peer-reviewed publication dedicated to advancing the art and science of neonatal care, serving for 5 years in this capacity. She was honored by NANN with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications and has been inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN) for her pioneering work in the field of neonatal care and improvement science.

Dr. Jacqueline McGrath is a Professor and Vice Dean for Faculty Excellence at the UTH San Antonio, School of Nursing. Research foci include integration of family-centered and developmentally supportive caregiving with premature infants and their families in the NICU. More specifically, her work has focused on the biobehavioral outcomes of increasing parent engagement on both parents and the infant. Increasing parent engagement is believed to be a mechanism for increasing parent self-management skills after infant discharge and ultimately enhancing infant long-term development. She has also conducted studies related to preterm infants’ oral feeding readiness and preterm infant touch and massage (parent provided). Based on her research, she developed the NICU-PLAY program for parents and their hospitalized preterm infants. She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles. Dr. McGrath is the Co-Editor for Advances in Neonatal Care the journal of the National Association of Neonatal Nurses. In 2007, Dr. McGrath became a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing. She received her BSN from the University of Akron; MSN from Kent State University in parent-child nursing; both a post-master’s certificate as a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Prof. (Dr.) Minesh Khashu M.B.B.S, MD, FRCPCH, FRSA, Q Fellow ( Health Foundation & NHS Improvement), Fellow England Centre for Practice Development Consultant Neonatologist, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust & Prof. of Perinatal Health, Bournemouth University. Clinical Director, Maternity & Neonatal Care, Regional Strategic Clinical Network, NHS England, Wessex Dr. Khashu has received national and international recognition for his work especially in Quality Improvement, Necrotizing Enterocolitis and improving fathers experiences of neonatal care. Dr. Khashu is a clinical leader reimagining healthcare with a focus on system wide transformation, continuous Quality Improvement and Patient Centred Care. He has experience of clinical management and leadership at hospital, regional and national level including strategic change, system redesign, large scale quality improvement and development of national guidance and multi stakeholder collaboration. He has developed the DadPad Neonatal, a resource to support dads whose babies have been admitted to neonatal units. This has been very well received by parents, families, healthcare professionals and charities and nominated for multiple national awards. https://thedadpad.co.uk/neonatal/ He has also set up SIGNEC (special interest group for NEC) in the U.K. and developed a website for parents/families and health professiaonals which has been much appreciated. https://signec.org/ He convenes International Conferences on NEC in London regularly.

Mariana Colmenares Castano was born in Mexico City, and from an early age she was fascinated by animals and nature.She studied medicine at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), and foundher passion as a pediatrician doing her residency at the National Pediatric Institute. When her first child was born she witnessed the lack of knowledge and commitment to breastfeeding within the medical profession, and so she decided to specialize in breastfeeding medicine. She certified as a Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) in 2011.Mariana is a member of the International Lactation Consultant Association, the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, and a proud founding member of the National Lactation Consultant Association of Mexico (ACCLAM), where she served on the Board of Directors as Education Coordinator (2014-2019). She is part of board director for the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine for a 3 year period (2019-2022) and recently named as secretary for the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine. Mariana is a member of the team for Breastfeeding Country Index BFCI, a project from Yale University and Universidad Iberoamericana. She is consultant for the National Health Institute in Mexico and has collaborated with UNICEF in breastfeeding projects and part of the steering committee for the WHO. She has spoken at national and international conferences, co-published numerous articles and co-authored a chapter for the National Academy of Medicine. At the moment she is a Clinical Fellow in Community Paediatrics in London.

Jeanette Mesite Frem, MHS, IBCLC, RLC, CCE is an experienced childbirth educator, IBCLC-lactation consultant and retired birth doula. She started her career working with families while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa in the early 90s. She loved that work so much she went on to receive a public health masters degree from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, focusing her studies on nutrition for maternal and child health. Her two children were breastfed for more than 2 years each and Jeanette has experience pumping at work for both children and has supported more than a thousand families with feeding and pumping over the last 20 years.

Jeanette provides prenatal childbirth and breastfeeding classes at her office in Northborough, Massachusetts, as well as providing virtual and office feeding consultations. She also enjoys leading workshops for perinatal health professionals and mentoring those who work with families. If you have questions, feel free to email [email protected].

After raising three children as a stay-at-home mother, Dr. Phillips received a Masters degree in Developmental Psychology, became NIDCAP certified as an Infant Developmental Specialist, and then attended medical school at University of California, Davis, graduating in 2004. She completed her pediatric residency and neonatology fellowship at Loma Linda University Children's Hospital in Loma Linda, CA and is currently an attending neonatologist in the NICU at the same hospital as well as Co-Medical Director of Newborn Nursery at Loma Linda University Medical Center-Murrieta. Dr. Phillips is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant and is a Fellow of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine. She is the immediate past president of the National Perinatal Association. Her primary areas of interest are mother-infant attachment, breastfeeding education and support, and Family-Centered Neuroprotective Care of premature infants in the NICU.