Perinatal Support Service

Depression and/or anxiety can lead to unresponsive parenting and reductions in the quality of parent-child relationships. These, in turn, are a significant risk factor for poor social, emotional and behavioural development in infants.

This project was designed to target this specific chain of risk.

• Increase resilience and long-term coping strategies of participant parents and their infants
• Improve the mental health of participant parents
• Improve emotional attachment between participant parents and their infants
• Reduce social isolation of participant parents and families

• 319 women and birthing people received support.
• 149 volunteers were recruited and trained.
• 36% of volunteers progressed into employment or full-time education.
• The assessments collected included the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ9), which is a measure of depression, and the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Assessment 7 (GAD7) which is a measure of anxiety:
• • • For the PHQ-9 measure, the average score before receiving support was 11.69 (SD = 5.02). This had decreased to 5.72 (SD = 3.92) at the end of support. This is a reduction of 5.97 points and was found to be statistically significant (indicated by the 95% confidence intervals of the score distributions).
    • For the GAD-7 measure, the average score was 11.28 (SD = 4.17) before receiving support and 6.15 (SD = 3.89) at the end. This is a reduction of 5.13 points and was also found to be statistically significant.
    • Scores above 10 on either measure indicate clinically-relevant symptoms, suggesting that the project was seeing women with mental health needs.
    • The change in scores observed for both the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 from the start to end of support indicates a shift from clinically-relevant to mild symptoms.
• Participants who completed the My Baby and Me sessions all had improved Maternal Postnatal Attachment Scale (MPAS) scores – an average of 5%. They also reported that their understanding of their baby’s cues and communication had improved by on average 5/10. (Average understanding before the group sessions was 4/10, average understanding after the sessions was 9/10).
• Over a third of volunteers (36%) progressed into employment or full-time education after leaving the service. Given that 72% of appointed volunteers were motivated to take the role as work experience, this suggests that volunteering with the project offered a golden opportunity to develop the skills and confidence to pursue further professional development.
• The project saw a decrease in the number of active volunteers since the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, however this did not have a detrimental effect on the support offered as there was an increase in requests for remote support.
• The service was upscaled as part of the district-wide Start for Life programme, leading notably to an increase in referrals within the Better Start Bradford area.

*This section includes information from both the evaluation report/s and project