Broader skills for working with perinatal depression

Health visitors' involvement in work with maternal depression has developed considerably over the last 10 years, with a focus upon problems in the postnatal period. In a paper last month we reported on research highlighting dilemmas that can arise for health visitors connected with a lack of an agreed conceptual framework. Conflicting roles they find themselves using when working with distressed mothers, and within a pressured organisational work setting, make it hard to give sufficient priority to such work. By focussing too narrowly on postnatal depression, other important perinatal psychological difficulties may be left unattended. We argue the need to create workplace time to address these issues by describing the provision of a training and supervision package to facilitate this. We give some informal indications of its success and some indicators of the broadening development of its membership and its content