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>Via the newsletter of the UK Marce Society http://www.marcesociety.com/ I have discovered that there is some new NIHR (http://www.nihr.ac.uk) funded research for a programme development grant on perinatal psychiatry services. Perhaps you can help provide some data?

(Lead investigator: Louise Howard, Reader in Women’s Mental Health, Institute of Psychiatry; coinvestigators:Ian Jones, Alain Gregoire, Kathryn Abel, Angelika Wieck, Trudi Seneviratne, Carmine Pariante, Sue Pawlby, Sonia Johnson, Andy Kent, Morven Leese, Sarah Byford, Craig Morgan, Diana Rose).

We are planning some pilot work as part of this programme development grant which we hope will lead to a programme of research investigating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of psychiatric services for women with severe perinatal psychiatric disorders.

This pilot work will include the following objectives:
1. To identify which NHS Mental Health Trusts do, or do not, have
ready accessibility of Mother and Baby Unit (MBU) beds and
determine which will agree to participate in recruitment of women
admitted to services in the perinatal period (during pregnancy and
postpartum)

2. To carry out a census in a sample of Mental Health Trusts of the
number of women admitted to inpatient psychiatric services (MBU
or general wards) or intensive home treatment in the perinatal
period over the previous 3 months in order to establish potential
recruitment rates

3. To modify existing measures of pathways to admission, service
user characteristics, content of care, and service use for women
and their infants in the perinatal period

4. To pilot measures

5. To pilot data collection of medical record data for women from
general adult psychiatric wards, Mother and Baby Units and home
treatment teams to provide information for a future sample size
calculation

6. To explore ethical issues regarding data collection from vulnerable
patients on safeguarding, mother-infant interaction, attachment
and infant outcomes in the proposed research programme

We hope you will all be able to help our researcher in collecting
data for this work. If you would like to know more about the research
then do contact Louise (louise.howard@kcl.ac.uk).

Good luck with the research!

Elaine Hanzak

www.hanzak.com