Transforming Bradford's Perinatal Mental Health Data Through Local Collaboration 

Perinatal Mental Illness (PMI) is a term for mental health problems experienced during pregnancy and up to two years after childbirth. As PMI can have long-lasting effects on both the women and their families if left untreated, timely access to good quality data is essential for ensuring families receive the support they need and for local service planning. 

Researchers from Born in Bradford collaborated with the Bradford District and Craven Perinatal and Infant Mental Health Steering Group to explore ways to optimise local service data. This involved analysing routine maternity and health visiting records for mothers participating in the BiB4All cohort. The aim was to understand how effectively these data can be used to identify inequalities in PMI and help local services understand where they are needed most to ensure every mother gets the right care.

This analysis highlighted the following challenges:

• Information on a woman’s mental health is recorded in several different ways and places, where much of these data are not accessible or easily extracted for analysis.

• Information about referrals for perinatal mental health support was limited. This is likely due to this information being recorded in documentation attached to individual health records, which are unable to be extracted for analysis. 

• Information about a mother’s background, such as their ethnicity or their spoken language, was not well completed in health visiting records. 

In April 2025, the team hosted a workshop bringing together services providing or commissioning perinatal mental health care in Bradford. The aim was to share the findings from the BiB4All analysis and identify actionable next steps for improving local data.

An important next step was securing resources for data administrative support to ensure accurate data collection, sharing of data reports across services, and to drive forward improvements to the data systems. 

Team Contact

Dr Hollie Henderson [hollie.henderson@bthft.nhs.uk]