Pregnancy: Mental Illness

(asked on 5th November 2014) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many women who have been diagnosed with mental health problems have given birth in NHS maternity units in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Dan Poulter Portrait
Dan Poulter
This question was answered on 10th November 2014

More than 10% of women experience perinatal mental health problems or mental illness (i.e. during pregnancy or in the first postnatal year) and that is why improving diagnosis and services for women with perinatal mental health problems is one of the Department’s key objectives for maternity care.

Health Education England is working to ensure that pre and post registration training in perinatal mental health is available to enable specialist perinatal mental health staff to be available to every birthing unit by 2017.

The following table shows a count of delivery episodes with a primary or secondary diagnosis of mental health problems for the years 2008-09 to 2012-13

Year

Finished delivery episodes

2008-09

6,723

2009-10

8,304

2010-11

12,690

2011-12

16,696

2012-13

19,841

The term ’perinatal mental illness’ is not classifiable within the ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases) classification system used to identify diagnoses in the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database, but codes do exist to classify mental and behavioural disorders in pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium.

It should be noted that this is not a count of people as the same person may have had more than one admission episode within the same time period.

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