Building Bridges Quality Improvement Programme Innovation Grant Fund
Non-profit organisations supporting pregnant women or their partners or families with children under 2, can apply for this grant to develop and deliver innovative quality improvement projects. This includes not-for-profit NHS trusts, primary care networks and GP practices.
Your project must align with the Kent Best Start in Life Local Plan and one of the following Kent strategies:
About the grant
All grant recipients will form part of a Building Bridges network to regularly share ideas, practice and learning across the network and build a system of staff that see themselves as the foundation of quality improvement.
As well as impacting how staff see themselves in relation to supporting parents, it is anticipated that families will also be positively impacted by seeing staff and services leading quality improvement projects that are there to support them to begin and continue their parenting journey.
Where appropriate, the grant will support services to achieve relevant quality marks such as UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative or Baby Bliss accreditation.
What the grant can be used for
Projects should have a least one of the following aims or outcomes:
- Parents, who are separated from their baby, are empowered in all elements of their baby’s care, promoting sensitivity, attunement, understanding of infant cues, and enabling the development of strong, close, and loving attachments.
- Early and regular parental physical contact with baby or increasing time that parents/ siblings get to spend with baby, for example, within neonatal units.
- Ensure equity of outreach support for babies either leaving neonatal care.
- Support bonding in pregnancy or support for parents, co-parents and carers to be actively involved in infant care, bonding, and their own wellbeing.
- Improve antenatal contingency planning for feeding approach, night feeding and sleep, pelvic floor tears, caesarean section or impact of feeding on the on mothers relationship with other children (recognising feature of the early weeks with a newborn that eases as feeding establishes).
- Improve accessibility of existing support or services.
- Increase babies’ first milk as breast (mother or donor).
- Increase initiation of expressing soon after birth (aim within 2 hours).
- Increase access to donor milk in hospital or in the community.
- Support transition to exclusively breastfeeding by 6-8 weeks.
- Improve continuity of care across key transitions and services (antenatal to postnatal, neonatal discharge to home), ensuring families experience coordinated and consistent support with infant feeding, perinatal mental health and parent infant relationships.
- Support for parents with birth trauma to address trauma and support bond with baby if that has been affected.
- Listen to the experiences of black families with babies and provide co-produced support.
- Reduces isolation or improve awareness of cultural sensitives for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.
- Embedding newly acquired workforce knowledge and/ or skills to improve quality of practice across perinatal mental health, parent–infant relationships, and infant feeding for key groups at risk of poor maternal outcomes.
- Prevent jaundice in newborns.
- Help parents create rich language and learning environments from birth.
For more information, read our grant prospectus (PDF, 344.6 KB).
Apply
Applications close on 20 July 2026.
For more information or support with your application email infantfeeding@kent.gov.uk .