My Blog

Today I spoke at a workshop funded by Mental Health in Higher Education, held at Staffordshire University. www.mhhe.heacademy.ac.uk

The workshop, lead by Dr. Liz Boath, was entitled ‘Learning and Teaching about perinatal mental health – Don’t let women slip through the net’.

It was aimed at all health and social care educators, including practice teachers, mentors and service user trainers and carers with involvement in education.

It was oversubscribed!

Dr. Carol Henshaw gave a presentation on ‘Perinatal Mental Health: a fly past’.
To summarise she stressed

1. It isn’t all about postnatal depression
2. Serious psychiatric morbidity is associated with childbearing and these mothers and children have poor outcomes
3. All professionals involved in caring for pregnant and postpartum women require the appropriate knowledge, skills and attitudes to mange these conditions.

Sadly such training is thin on the ground!

I gave an outline of my story and stressed the need to include perinatal mental health training to as many health and social work professionals as possible.

Delegates then looked at ways to include such training in the curriculum in their establishments.

A request was made for me to make a DVD for training. If I did would you want one? Please let me know! All suggestions taken on board!

Let’s hope Mental Health in Higher Education can help us do another session!

Elaine

www.hanzak.com