Understanding the quality of routine data for identifying inequalities in perinatal mental health in Bradford

Born in Bradford For All (BiB4All) is a cohort of mothers and babies in Bradford. Every pregnant woman booked to receive maternity care at Bradford Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is invited to join the cohort, by their midwife, as part of their standard antenatal appointments. This enables identifiable information that is collected by local public services, such as health education and social care, to be joined together and used for research. The aim is to use this information to build a clearer picture of children’s and families lives over time. This can then be used to help shape local services.

As part of Hollie’s PhD research, she hosted a workshop to identify how the data available for mothers and babies as part of the BiB4All could be used to support local needs. The workshop brought together people from different groups in Bradford, including local decision-makers, health care professionals working in maternity and health visiting services, and community members. They discussed and agreed on the most important and urgent research topics for the area. One of these priorities was around perinatal mental health, which are mental health difficulties experienced during the period when a woman becomes pregnant until about a year after the baby is born.

Hollie’s PhD research then focused on understanding whether the BiB4All data could be used to explore this research priority. Hollie’s research highlighted a gap in being able to identify the number of women experiencing perinatal mental health difficulties using the BiB4All data. This finding, combined with other research in Bradford 1-3 has motivated local health services to improve the collection of information about mental health by their services. They want to use this improved data to understand what families need and make sure they’re helping those who need it most.

The research project detailed in this proposal stemmed from this local need to improve the collection of mental health data and by the BiB4All research team actively talking to local services to understand how BiB4All data can support their services.

Hollie regularly attends local stakeholder group meetings such as ‘The Best 1001 days Steering Group for Bradford District and Craven’ and the ‘Perinatal & Infant Mental Health Steering Group’, where she showed how BiB4All data could be used to support their strategies. As a result, Hollie was approached by members of the Perinatal & Infant Mental Health Steering Group to help them understand:

1. What BiB4All data could tell us about who is being identified as experiencing perinatal mental health difficulties, who is referred to specialist services and if there are inequalities in accessing perinatal mental health support.
2. How local services could better collect information on women and families that would enable them to explore inequalities in access to their services. There is a particular interest in inequalities based on age and ethnicity.

As the Born in Bradford’s Better Start (BiBBS) cohort also joins together data that are routinely collected about families by local services, this proposed research would like to explore the research questions using both BiB4All and BiBBS datasets. This will increase the amount of data we have available and allow for comparison between the data available in the two cohorts.

This research will inform a data workshop with local perinatal mental health services in Bradford, which will be focused around improving the collection of perinatal mental health data by services in Bradford.