Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans his Department has to increase support for new mothers for postnatal (a) physical, and (b) mental health.

Promoting good physical and mental health support for new mothers is a key priority for NHS England, with its importance reflected in both ‘Better Births’ and the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health.

One of the visions of ‘Better Births’, the report of the National Maternity Review published in February 2016, includes recommendations to deliver ‘Better postnatal and perinatal mental health care’. NHS England and its partners are working on an ambitious programme to increase capacity and capability in specialist perinatal mental health services across England so that more women can access appropriate, high-quality specialist mental health care, closer to home, when they need it during the perinatal period, both in the community and in inpatient Mother and Baby Units. This transformation is backed by £365 million investment between 2015/16 and 2020/21.

Other aspects of the ‘Better Births’ vision will directly improve postnatal care: continuity of carer will mean that more women see the same midwife in the antenatal period, during the birth and into the postnatal period; women will have a personalised care plan, including the postnatal period; and community hubs will make it easier for women to access a range of services which could include postnatal services, such as breastfeeding support, and perinatal mental healthcare.

A Maternity Transformation Programme has been set up to implement the ‘Better Births’ vision and support 44 Local Maternity Systems to deliver local change by March 2021.