Motivated by a mandate: a university-clinic partnership to develop a perinatal depression registry at a community based hospital in the Midwest

Abstract

Disparities in maternal mental health outcomes persist despite the myriad of existing evidence based treatments and recent public health prevention policy efforts. Integrated health care delivery models such as Collaborative Care and patient medical home models have the potential to reduce health disparities in clinic settings. These evidence-based approaches require multidisciplinary teams for successful implementation and to provide quality care to improve specified patient outcomes. However, strategies for successful collaboration and steps for critical reflection are often overlooked in clinical and health services research. Furthermore, a shared vision of social justice is essential in the process of building and sustaining patient-centered care models, but is often understated. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and implementation of a social justice-informed hospital-based perinatal depression registry to address maternal health disparities. Our partnership is informed by community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles for carrying out health services research. We describe the steps for building a sustainable university-hospital collaboration between traditional and non-traditional researchers using principles from CBPR in a clinic setting.