The NHS is set to overhaul services for women who develop mental health problems around childbirth in a bid to ease the suffering caused by postnatal depression and reduce the number of new mothers who kill themselves or their baby.
NHS England is putting £40m into new specialist treatment centres for the one in five women whose pregnancy, birth or experience afterwards triggers serious psychological problems, including anxiety, depression and psychosis.
Claire Murdoch, its national mental health director, said these centres would end a “postcode lottery” in which two in three women currently affected missed out on vital help. While 14,000 new mothers each year received specialised support, the planned expansion of care would enable another 30,000 to do so by March 2021, said Murdoch, a former mental health nurse who also runs the Central and North West London NHS foundation trust in London.
“It’s self-evidently true that the current provision of these services is inadequate. There is a big postcode lottery. Some areas just do not have specialist community perinatal services available,” she added.
The money will be put into new community mental health units solely for women with perinatal mental health problems in 20 parts of England. They will be staffed by consultant psychiatrists specialising in such conditions, nurses with experience in the field, occupational therapists, psychologists and nursery nurses. Each will also run a buddying service in which women who have already experienced childbirth-related mental health problems will support those going through that or at risk of that.
Childbirth-related mental health conditions are estimated to cost the UK £8.1bn a year, or about £10,000 per birth.
Prof Lesley Regan, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said: “Around one in five women develop a mental illness during pregnancy or in the first year after delivering their baby, and one quarter of all maternal deaths between six weeks and a year after childbirth are related to mental health problems.
“Despite these alarming figures, in almost half of the UK, pregnant women and new mothers have no access to specialist maternal mental health services and only 3% of [NHS] clinical commissioning groups [in England] have a maternal mental health service strategy,” she added.
The Royal College of Midwives backed the move but said that every maternity unit needed to have a specialist maternal mental health midwife on staff to help women in sometimes desperate need.
“We cannot continue to read the constant reports of the number of women killing themselves because they were not identified earlier and treated or because of the lack of trained staff or as a result of lack of services. It’s heartbreaking and we can do better as a country,” said Janet Fyle, the college’s professional policy advisor.
The NCT, the parenting charity, welcomed the NHS’s “positive plan” but warned that even if all 20 units were set up by 2021 as promised, there will still be “a long way to go” before all mothers who need help get it, said Elizabeth Duff, its senior policy adviser.
“There are nearly 300,000 women in the UK who suffer from mental health problems postnatally or when pregnant each year and the funding aims to reach 30,000 women in 20 areas, so there’s still a long way to go,” she added.
NHS England is also pledging to spend another £120m putting psychiatrists and specialist nurses into A&E units so that patients undergoing a mental health crisis when they turn up at an emergency department get better help.
NHS England plans to introduce new waiting-time standards to ensure that any such patient is seen by a mental health specialist within an hour of their arrival in A&E and also given a plan for their care within four hours.
NHS to create specialist centres for childbirth mental health problems
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