Motivational Interviewing

The overall aim of this study is to examine whether help-seeking for mental health issues can be increased through a brief motivational interviewing (MI) intervention. Recently, MI has shown enormous success in other fields of healthcare. The key concept is to prepare and motivate women to take action for their own emotional health needs in the year following childbirth.

Substantial numbers of women with postnatal depression (PND) do not accept help even when depressed; yet there is scant research on this group. Currently, no effective, evidence-based strategy to enhance access to services exists, despite findings that as few as 1 in 3 depressed women correctly identified by screening end up receiving treatment.

There is an urgent need to redress this and see if we can improve uptake of treatment when women experience PND. We hypothesise that MI intervention will prepare women to take action for their own current and future emotional health needs, based on a readiness for change model. In this study, MI is to be delivered by Maternal and Child Health Nurses during a routine postnatal screening and emotional health assessment and two subsequent routine appointments.

The longitudinal design of this study allows us to track changes in measures of emotional health throughout the first year postpartum. This will help build a clearer picture of the paths that postnatal women take through the health system following both positive and negative screening results for PND.