TPHC Senior Consultant Zoe Hooper has written a blog for the NHS Alliance exploring how North Central London‘s local maternity and neonatal system worked to close a stark gap in perinatal mental health outcomes.

The blog draws on North Central London’s participation in the NHS Race and Health Observatory’s Maternal and Neonatal Learning and Action Network (LAN) – a peer-to-peer quality improvement programme bringing together ten teams across England to address ethnic inequalities through an explicit anti-racism lens. The work uncovered a significant disparity in how mental health needs were identified at booking: only 8% of Black African women were flagged with perinatal mental health needs, compared with 28% of White British women – close to the expected prevalence of 27%.

Go to Zoe’s blog on the NHS Alliance website to learn more, including about the Lavender Team, a community midwifery team in Tottenham, specific learnings from the programme and the case for applying an anti-racism lens to quality improvement across maternity and neonatal systems.

🔗View the blog on the NHS Alliance website

Zoe Hooper is a Senior Consultant at TPHC and programme manager for this work. Fatuma Hassan is a Consultant at TPHC and was project manager for the programme.