Code of Ethics of The Possums Sleep Program

If you like The Possums Sleep Program, and are interested in using it with parents, babies and toddlers, I invite you to join

• Parent mentor training (coming soon)

• NDC providers and educators (coming soon)

• Sleep Baby & You

• NDC Accreditation.

If you decide not to join these courses and gain those qualifications, please always refer people back to drpam.baby or ndcinstitute.com.au if you are influenced by The Possums Sleep Program and are commercialising it in your work or promotions of your practice.

There are multiple programs available now that are derivative of The Possums Sleep Program, by individuals who have participated in my courses and programs, often from when they were delivered through the charity I founded Possums for Mothers and Babies 2013-2023, but who don't acknowledge this influence publicly. You can find out what the unique elements of The Possums Sleep Program are here.

It's unethical to use The Possums Sleep Program and adapt it for your own commercial benefit delivering services and education, without acknowledging that you've been exposed to it and benefited from it. You can do this by putting the urls drpam.baby and ndcinstitute.com.au in a prominent place on your website or materials. I'd be so grateful for your integrity! Often people don't understand the huge difference between a clinical and educational integration of and translation of the research, which is an individual's intellectual property, and the research studies themselves.

I dream of a day when every family has access to The Possums Sleep Program, either through this online program or through their own health professionals across multiple disciplines, who are upskilled in NDC or the Possums programs. I have hopes that you'll join me in a movement for change in the way parents, health professionals and educators think about baby and toddler sleep.

But if my aim and life passion has been to contribute to change, why does protecting protecting The Possums Sleep Program from unethical use that doesn't acknowledge my name and my online site at drpam.baby matter so much?

It's about having the moral (and in also legal) right to own and have an income from my programs, which are a life work. To understand this help you make sense of this, I need to explain three things.

1. In Australia, where I live, a GP like myself is only paid when I see a patient in the clinic. Primary health care is a small business model here. Unlike doctors who work in hospital settings, there is no payment for research or education integrated into my working day. This is why developing up The Possums Sleep Program, in its different versions over so many years, has been unpaid work for me.

2. In Australia, health research funding is mostly directed towards biomedical innovations, not behavioural programs like The Possums Sleep Program. Universities have little appetite for commercialising primary health care behaviour programs, despite my efforts to interest them. Many programs that you might think of in the space of parents with babies, such as Circle of Security and Triple P have been developed by university psychologists, whose universities supported and paid them to commercialise the programs - and whose universities engaged lawyers to protect their intellectual property. I have not had a paid university position, from which to receive the benefits of university commericalisation programs (and was not able to interest universties in this).

3. Breastfeeding advocates have developed a culture of 'cancelling' work which doesn't align with popular views. I have engaged publicly over over the past two decades in promoting views which were contrary to views expressed by popular prominent individuals, breastfeeding organisations or government funded breastfeeding advocacy bodies, including by pubishing and speaking out publicly about the widespread overdiagnosis and overtreatment of conditions such as tongue-tie. This means that The Possums Sleep Program, built out of clinical breastfeeding knowledge and research using those same theoretical frames, is often 'cancelled' by breastfeeding support circles. It seems to me that breastfeeding advocates and organisations who like my sleep work, which is embedded in deep clinical knowledge of how to support breastfeeding and lactation, have been using it anyway without acknowledging its name or origins.

In order to continue with my work, offering innovative, evidence-based clinical and educational support for parents and babies, I ask you to please always acknowledge The Possums Sleep Program if it is influencing your own work, and refer people back to drpam.baby or ndcinstitute.com.au

Thank you so much! This way, The NDC Institute and the Possums programs will be able to survive and thrive. Together, we'll create a movement for change in the way parents and their babies or toddlers are cared for.

Notes

The Possums Sleep Program has been borrowed by other programs since 2011. If it looks similar, it will be derivative. There was nothing like it prior. Hopefully those programs and health professionals and educators who write about sleep approaches which are not sleep training publicly, and who draw on the key principles of The Possums Sleep Program but are not operating within the NDC Networks, will foreground an ethical acknowledge of The Possums Sleep Program as their influence.

These principles did not spring up as random, disparate pieces of research evidence for the picking across interdisciplinary research literatures, to make an effective clinical and education intervention for infant sleep. Instead, they have been painstakingly assembled into specific concepts through my particular combination of lenses, including evolutionary biology and complexity science, and then translated into a clinical and education intervention through the lens of holistic generalist clinical practice.

If my work is ethically akcnowledged, for which I'd be incredibly grateful, I and my team at The NDC Institute will have the funds to be able to continue on. In Australia, where primary healthcare is based upon a small business model, a genuinely innovative, community-based health initiative like this one rarely attracts University or research funding, and needs to survive in the small business context, which can only happen if there is ethical acknowledgement from others who use it. You can find out how to do this here.