Interview with NBAS trainer, Hanne Munck, conducted by Jessica Nagel at the 2002 International NBAS Trainers Conference at Children's Hospital, Boston.

When did you first learn about the NBAS?
I heard about the scale in 1974 and was trained for reliability by Dr. Heidelise Als in 1984.

How have you since incorporated it into your discipline?
I have used it in the primary and changing hospital routines according to the needs of infants and mothers. I used it in the secondary prefolactic level in the work with preterm babies with help from Dr. Als. I used it in Tattier prefolactic (when there are difficulties/symptoms), working as head of the university clinic educating professionals at all levels, and using it clinically and for observation.

Would you please share a vignette or meaningful moment you had while working with the NBAS?
When you are assessing the infant in the newborn period, you think you are assessing the infant and not the parents. When the parents aren't there, you still understand a lot about the infants and what their interactions with their parents are. While working at the hospital, I was going to do the NBAS on the child of a Scandinavian woman. I felt very awkward sitting with the child because I felt she had no weight. She was not hypertonic and she felt light and scared. She was not alert. I sat and talked with her and she relaxed, but she still felt strange. The mother didn't want to be there so the nurses came instead. Afterwards I felt there was something wrong and mentioned it to the nurses. The day after my visit with her, the nurses found out that the mother had tried to drown her daughter. It is amazing that on the second day of life you can feel these emotions in the baby. You can feel if the baby has been held in the right way. There was a study that babies, whose mothers got depressed, were disorganized. It is not until later that studies found that these mothers were depressed and then people think that it is the characteristics of the child that cause the mother's depression. I think it is the other way around. Interactions in the first days of a child's life can do a lot.

How do you conceive the role of the instrument in the future?
One hope of mine is that researchers and clinicians could work together so that we can go deeper into the clinical research of understanding things like depression in young mothers and the struggle that the fathers go through.