Hammersmith Infant Neurological Examination Online Training Course

Dr Joanne George

Consultant Physiotherapist, Physiotherapy Department, Queensland Children’s Hospital, Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service, Brisbane, Australia and Child Health Research Centre, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

Joanne George is a Consultant Physiotherapist at the Queensland Children’s Hospital and Academic Title Holder at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. An experienced clinician in early infant development, her PhD involved early brain imaging studies in very preterm infants seeking to investigate earlier imaging and clinical biomarkers to identify infants at risk of adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. Following her doctoral studies she established and led the Queensland Early Detection and Intervention Network (QEDIN-CP), a translational implementation project, which aimed to improve earlier detection of infants at risk of cerebral palsy, and fast track them to targeted early interventions aimed at improving outcomes across Queensland. She continues to work clinically at the Queensland Children’s Hospital predominantly in the area of early assessment and intervention in children with early brain injuries, teaches the HINE and HNNE, leads follow-up research studies in her novel cohort of very preterm born infants with early neonatal imaging, and is the research lead for paediatric physiotherapists within Queensland Health. https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/3671

Professor Leena Haataja

Paediatric Neurologist

Department of Child Neurology, University of Helsinki and Helsinki University Hospital, Finland

Leena Haataja works as a Professor of Child Neurology at the University of Helsinki and as a Chief Consultant at the Helsinki University Hospital, Finland. Her research focuses are on fetal and neonatal risk factors, potential protective factors (e.g. genetic mechanisms, early parent-infant interaction) and prediction of their possible long-term neurodevelopmental effects (e.g. https://sites.utu.fi/pipari/en/ ; https://www.babacenter.fi/our-projects). She is also involved in many projects aiming to standardize clinically applicable assessment methods and compose treatment guidelines that harmonize clinical treatment processes. She has worked at the Hammersmith Hospital as a clinical research fellow in 1990’s, and she is one of the original authors of the HINE method.

Professor Frances Cowan

Perinatal Neurologist

Department of Paediatrics, Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College London

Professor Cowan is an Honorary Senior Lecturer/Clinical Consultant in perinatal neurology, Imperial College London and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Neonatal Neuroscience at the University of Bristol. She trained in medicine in Dublin, Ireland (1972) and then specialised in paediatrics and neonatology in the UK. She did a PhD in Oslo, Norway, using Doppler techniques to measure neonatal cerebral blood flow. This led to a position at the Hammersmith Hos

pital in London, UK with Dr Lilly Dubowitz and others in neonatal neurology, cranial ultrasound, MR brain imaging and neurodevelopmental follow-up. She has a particular interest in perinatal brain injury, its timing and risk factors, patterns of injury and their evolution and the early determination of prognosis. A focus has been the prediction of normality and severity of neurological abnormality minimising uncertainly for parents.

Teaching and mentoring continue to be a large part of her work and she still with others runs a course in cranial ultrasound imaging. She has with Dr Miriam Martinez Biarge, developed a website providing information on the Hammersmith Neonatal and Infant Neurological Examinations and making them readily available world-wide. In 2018, she received the James Spence Medal, from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, UK. 

Professor Brigitte Vollmer

Paediatric Neurologist

Department of Neonatal and Paediatric Neurology, Southampton University Hospital, UK

Brigitte Vollmer is Professor of Perinatal and Developmental Neurology at the University of Southampton, UK, and Honorary Consultant in Neonatal and Paediatric Neurology at Southampton Children’s Hospital, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust. She studied medicine at the Eberhard-Karls-University, Tuebingen, Germany, and trained as a Paediatrician and then as a Paediatric Neurologist at the Children´s Hospital, University of Tuebingen, Germany. Subsequently, she moved to the UCL Institute of Child Health/Great Ormond Street Hospital and University College London Hospitals, London, to receive clinical specialist and research training in neonatal neurology and in neurodevelopmental follow-up of infants born at risk. Her PhD studies focused on neuroimaging investigations of brain structure –function relationships in preterm infants.

After having been awarded a Marie-Curie Fellowship she moved to Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, for postdoctoral studies, which were focused on different aspects of neurodevelopment, in particular, motor development, and associations with brain structure as assessed with qualitative and quantitative magnetic resonance imaging methods in children with unilateral cerebral palsy and children born extremely preterm.

The focus of her research is to investigate relationships between brain development and long term neurological and neurodevelopmental function in different groups of children who were born at high risk and/or have suffered adverse events in the peri/neonatal period that could result in brain damage of different degree. She leads the Southampton clinical Neonatal Neurology service, which provides care for newborns and infants with acute neurological problems and a standardised neurodevelopmental follow-up programme for NICU graduates who are at risk of impaired neurological and developmental outcomes.

Dr Miriam Martinez-Biarge

Paediatrician and Neonatologist

Department of Paediatrics, Queen Charlotte’s & Hammersmith Hospitals, Imperial College NHS Trust, London

Miriam Martinez-Biarge trained as a paediatrician and neonatologist at La Paz Children’s Hospital in Madrid, Spain, where she also did her PhD, focusing on risk factors for perinatal brain injury. Subsequently she completed an 18-month fellowship in Perinatal Neurology and Neurodevelopmental follow-up at Imperial College London with Professor Frances Cowan.

She works as a consultant paediatrician in the follow-up clinic at Queen Charlotte’s & Hammersmith Hospitals – Imperial College NHS Trust, London.

This course provides the opportunity to learn the administration, scoring and interpretation of the assessment through videos, descriptions, interactive questions and quizzes. Step-by-step examples in which the HINE has been used on infants are provided, and the opportunity to practice skills by assessing infants from pre-recorded videos:

• The only comprehensive HINE training available online (5 hours).
• Developed by an international team of experts who present up-to-date administration, scoring and interpretation of the tool.
• Includes official HINE training videos.
• Opportunity to practise the assessment using online examples with real time feedback.
• Certificate of completion.

This online resource is designed to help:

• Neonatologist
• Paediatric neurologist (including neonatal and perinatal)
• Physiatrist (Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation)
• Developmental paediatrician
• Paediatrics – other
• Doctor: other specialty
• Physiotherapist
• Speech and language therapist
• Occupational therapist
• Clinical psychologist
• Specialist in training / resident
• Medical student
• Clinical Nurse Specialist/Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner