Empowering Women and their Partners

Abstract

This series stresses the importance of perinatal mental health and wellbeing. Policy and guidelines have been written to help support midwives in delivering care so that a woman’s mental health is treated as comparable with her physical health. This third article in the series emphasises the promotion of perinatal mental wellbeing through the endorsement of self-efficacy. It demonstrates the difference midwives can make in sharing and signposting to specific resources that can help support women and families to maintain good mental wellbeing and educate about sub-optimal mental health. The authors draw on their experience of designing and using various local and national resources and discuss how these can help reduce stigma, encourage conversations and place mental health on a par with physical health in pregnancy.