New paper published on women’s engagement with community perinatal mental health services
Our Perinatal Mental Health Training and Service Development Lead has contributed to new research, published in BMC Psychiatry by Springer Nature
Our Perinatal Mental Health Training and Service Development Lead, Jo Brook, has co-written a new paper, Women’s engagement with community perinatal mental health services: a realist evaluation, which has been published in the latest edition of BMC Psychiatry. It is one of the largest and most comprehensive qualitative studies of perinatal mental health treatment engagement and outcomes published to date.
Based on analysis of 139 semi-structured interviews, the study examined how elements of provider care affected women’s engagement with community perinatal mental health services. Identifying four key pillars of engagement, the researchers concluded that key staff behaviours, applied at the right time, can not only support service users’ engagement but also potentially contribute to better treatment outcomes.
By providing further clarity on how to effectively engage perinatal women, the study will have important implications for community perinatal mental health services – but it also underlines the continued importance of appropriate, skilled care in this area.
Reflecting on the paper, Jo Brook said: “It has been really interesting to have been involved with this research which is part of a larger multi-method study, ‘ESMI-II: The effectiveness and cost effectiveness of community perinatal mental health services’, funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR). It shows how important it is for women and birthing people to receive care from practitioners who are perinatally competent. This is one of the reasons why appropriate training is so important, as perinatal knowledge and expertise supports women’s engagement with services”.
Additional papers related to the ESMI-II study are due to be published soon. The study consists of four areas of research, each focusing on different aspects of community perinatal mental health teams. These include variation in service delivery; the reliability, validity and clinical feasibility of observational measures for assessing parent-infant interactions; an exploration of health data; and an evaluation of the effectiveness of teams through research interviews – which this paper is based upon.
The paper is open access and available to read online now.
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Our courses seek to ensure that professionals across the whole perinatal mental health care pathway have the skills, competencies and expertise needed to support women and birthing people experiencing mental illness during the perinatal period.
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