The Maternity Consortium: Delivering inclusive specialist perinatal mental health services

The Maternity Consortium, fellow members of the VCSE Health & Wellbeing Alliance, are holding two free online events to support maternal mental health services and specialist perinatal mental health teams to deliver inclusive and accessible services.

The events will provide attendees with the opportunity to attend workshops facilitated by services, VCSEs and those with lived experience. The events are targeted at maternal mental health services and specialist perinatal mental health teams but are also open to anyone in the VCSE sector, local authorities, Maternity Voices Partnerships, service user voice representatives, other parts of the NHS, and academia with an interest in maternal and perinatal mental health.

The first event will take place on at 10-11:45am on Friday 10^th March with the following workshops to choose from:

1. LGBT Mummies – Talking about LGBT+ perinatal mental health experiences
2. Friends, Families and Travellers – This workshop will provide information on the inequalities that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people face when trying to access both maternal and perinatal mental health services.
3. Community Resources – A community-based organisation based in Barking & Dagenham, share how the well-being of socially-isolated individuals can be improved through developing trusted relationships and a strong sense of belonging. In this workshop we will hear from some mothers about their own journeys and what has helped along the way.
4. Mummy’s Day Out  – Mummy’s Day Out specialises in supporting and engaging Black and Brown mothers during the perinatal period and beyond. Often these mothers find statutory services do not meet their needs. This workshop will provide information on how statutory services can work with community organisations to reduce inequalities and coproduce accessible services.

You can find more information about the first event and register here.

The second event will take place at 10-11:45am on Wednesday 29^th March with the following workshops to choose from:

1. Birth Companions – Includes a focus on women experiencing loss through removal and is working to improve maternity care experiences for these families, the co-design of a new service to help ‘navigate’ through children’s social care involvement in pregnancy and the postnatal period.
2. Birmingham and Solihull Maternal Mental Health Service –This workshop will present research into British Pakistani women’s healthcare experiences following perinatal loss and consider its recommendations for services.
3. CPSL Mind and The Lantern Initiative – An insight/overview of the learnings from Starting Well; a co-produced perinatal mental health service for Muslim women in Peterborough.
4. Leeds Perinatal Service – he Leeds Perinatal Mental Health Service will be presenting a workshop dedicated to the importance of promoting inclusion and diversity within the perinatal period.
5. Five X More – insights from working with Black women.

You can find more information on the second event and register here.