The iHV supports the Maternal Mental Health Alliance’s (MMHA’s) response to yesterday’s publication of the Department of Health report ‘Safer Maternity Care: Next steps towards the national maternity ambition’.

MMHA highlights the mention of perinatal mental health in the report (on page 17) – but would really like to push for mums’ mental health to be embedded across all of the actions coming out of the report. Maternity safety is not just physical health: unless women’s mental health is looked after, their and their babies’ lives could also be at risk.

Dr Cheryll Adams, Executive Director iHV said:

“iHV supports the push by MMHA to keep maternal mental health at the forefront of the government’s drive to improve maternity care.  We welcome the implementation of this plan, including maternal mental health, and call on the government to ensure that specialist mental health support is available in every maternity /health visiting service to provide support to every mother and her family who require this service.”

Dr Alain Gregoire, Chair of the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, commented:

“We welcome the announcement by the Secretary of State of a Safer Maternity Care action plan and the inclusion of improvements in perinatal mental health care in this. Mental illnesses are the most common serious health complications of pregnancy and the postnatal period, and a major cause of maternal death. There has been no sign of improvement in the effects of these illnesses on mothers and their babies in the past decades, despite significant improvements in physical health outcomes.”

 

World MMH day logoThe first World Maternal Mental Health awareness day is 4 May 2016.

What is it? Organisations from around the world — including the UK, US, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Argentina, Malta, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Germany, Nigeria, will be raising awareness about maternal mental health through a collective social media push and in-country events on or around the 4 May.

What can I do? The Maternal Mental Health Alliance encourages ALL to use this day to communicate the message that maternal mental health matters. Everone is encouraged to do whatever they can, however major or minor.

Ideas: You may want to organise your own mini event or, if you already have an event planned for that day, you could use it to highlight World MMH Day.

Some organisations are encouraging mums to do a buggy walk, another peer support group will be making a cake with World MMH Day written on it, taking a photo and promoting it on social media. Maybe someone from your organisation could write a blog post and use the World MMH Day hashtag, twibbon and logo to get some media interest around your event or idea.

PLease keep MMHA updated on what you are planning – send photos on the day or tweet them @MMHAlliance

This can all be used to gain more support for World MMH Day next year and perhaps for some funding.

Resources and materials available are:

  1. Join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag: #maternalMHmatters
  2. Website/landing page: postpartum.net – please promote this landing page through your networks and on your websites.
  3. Adopt the Twibbon on World MMH day on Facebook or Twitter: com/Support/world-mmh-day
  4. World MMH logo
  5. World MMH poster

As Sport Relief announces their campaign to raise the profile of maternal mental health, the Institute of Health Visiting (iHV) highlights the vital role that health visitors have in supporting parents with perinatal mental ill-health, yet they currently have insufficient time or capacity for this important task.

Health visitors are the largest public health workforce. Through their delivery of services to every family with pre-school children, they are the best-placed public health professionals to identify, manage and provide early support for mothers and fathers with mild to moderate perinatal mental health problems and to seek early specialist help for those with more serious conditions.

In addition, health visitors are the trusted source of support for families according to research by the Early Intervention Foundation (2015). When parents were asked who they turned to for support, over 60% said their health visitor, closely followed by family and friends.

Dr Cheryll Adams, Executive Director of the Institute of Health Visiting, said: “Although parents will turn to their health visitor for support, often there is insufficient time for the health visitor to do an assessment. In a recent iHV survey, the results showed that 68% of health visitors have seen an increase in postnatal depression over the last two years. However, 1 in 4 health visitors cannot provide every family with a postnatal mental health (PMH) assessment at 6-8 weeks, and 3 in 4 cannot at 3-4 months as recommended by the Healthy Child Programme.

“While these figures have improved from previous years due to the investment in health visiting by the government, they make clear that sustained investment is needed to ensure that every mother has access to prompt help.”

Dr Cheryll Adams, Executive Director of the iHV

Dr Cheryll Adams, Executive Director of the iHV

The Antenatal and postnatal mental health quality standard has been published on the NICE website.

The following quality statements are particularly pertinent to health visitors:

  • Statement 4. Women are asked about their emotional wellbeing at each routine antenatal and postnatal contact.
  • Statement 5. Women with a suspected mental health problem in pregnancy or the postnatal period receive a comprehensive mental health assessment.
  • Statement 6. Women referred for psychological interventions in pregnancy or the postnatal period start treatment within 6 weeks of referral.

Dr Cheryll Adams, Director of the iHV said:

“The Institute really welcomes this quality standard, as we are sure our members will.  It can provide a basis for audit to drive up the quality of services.”

The independent Mental Health Taskforce to the NHS in England publishes its report today – The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health.

The taskforce gives a frank assessment of the state of current mental health care across the NHS, highlighting that one in four people will experience a mental health problem in their lifetime and the cost of mental ill-health to the economy, NHS and society is £105bn a year.

In response to this report, NHS England  has committed to the biggest transformation of mental health care across the NHS in a generation, pledging to help more than a million extra people and investing more than a billion pounds a year by 2020/21.

Dr Cheryll Adams, Executive Director of the iHV, said:

“The Institute very much welcomes this wide ranging report and hopes that indeed it will attract the promised funding of £1billion.  We are very pleased that perinatal mental health has again been singled out as a mental health priority.”

One in five mothers suffers from mental health problems during pregnancy or in the first year after childbirth. It costs around £8.1 billion for each annual birth cohort or almost £10,000 per birth. Yet fewer than 15% of areas have the necessary perinatal mental health services and more than 40% provide none at all.

The report suggests that new funding should be invested to support at least 30,000 more women each year to access evidence-based specialist mental health care in the perinatal period.