The Maternal Mental Health Alliance has launched a new phase of the Everyone’s Business campaign calling for essential perinatal mental health care for all women and families in the UK
Everyone who comes into contact with women before, during or after pregnancy has the opportunity to provide mental health support. All care counts. Only by taking a proactive, rounded approach to maternal mental health can the significant human and economic costs of undiagnosed or untreated perinatal mental health problems be prevented. The MMHA have a variety of tools and resources available for anyone working with women in the perinatal period.
The MMHA’s ‘Make all care count’ campaign phase highlights and defines all services – in addition to specialist perinatal mental health services – that can play a crucial role in improving outcomes for women with or at risk of poor maternal mental health.
Find out more about MMHA’s campaign
How can peer support programmes get involved?
The MMHA have suggested ways you can champion and campaign for better services for women with perinatal mental health problems in your local area.
Peer supporters play a vital role in enabling women to get the right support. Through building trusting relationships women often feel more able to confide in their peer supporter who can then support them to get the right help in a timely manner. Untreated perinatal mental health issues affect women, children and partners, and the impact from this can ripple through generations.
Much more needs to be done however to raise awareness of how valuable peer support is in supporting maternal mental health. We would like to feature more community voices on the Parents 1st UK website to help amplify the work that is being done and invite anyone with a story to share to get in touch. The valuable work that peer support initiatives do needs to be both celebrated and highlighted to allow commissioners and funders to really understand the difference peer support can make.
Tell us below if and how you’ll be supporting the ‘Make all care count’ campaign…