MMHLA Launches New Perinatal Mental Health Training Database for Health Care Professionals
Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance (MMHLA), with support from CVS Health®, is celebrating the launch of our new Perinatal Mental Health Training Database, which is designed to help current and aspiring health care professionals expand their knowledge about perinatal mental health conditions.
Mental health conditions are the most common complication of pregnancy and childbirth, impacting at least 1 in 5 women during pregnancy or the year following pregnancy (source 1, source 2), with individuals from historically marginalized communities at even higher risk. Approximately 75% of those affected by these conditions remain untreated, increasing the risk of long-term negative impacts on mothers, babies, families, and society, and costing our nation’s economy $14 billion each year.
The need for a training database was identified through MMHLA’s Perinatal Mental Health Education and Screening Project, which brought together over 200 health care professionals, birth workers, community health workers, and other key participants to identify challenges in educating and screening birthing people for perinatal mental health conditions. One of the major barriers that emerged from these discussions was the need for additional training and knowledge about perinatal mental health conditions.
“Perinatal mental health conditions are temporary and treatable, especially when birthing people are educated about and screened for them as early as possible. As an organization committed to improving maternal mental health, it is imperative for MMHLA to find out where the gaps in screening and education are happening and to do everything we can to bridge them,” says Adrienne Griffen, MPP, MMHLA’s Executive Director. “The Screening Project enabled us to hear directly from health care professionals about what they need to better support women and birthing people in the perinatal period, and thanks to support from CVS Health, we were able to build this database and make it freely available.”
“Education and screening for perinatal mental health conditions has the power to save lives,” says Joanne Armstrong, MD, MPH, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Women’s Health and Genomics, CVS Health. “We’re proud to support the work of MMHLA in empowering health care professionals with the tools and education they need, including this new database, to treat women and birthing people throughout their pregnancy and birth journey.”
The Perinatal Mental Health Training Database includes over 160 trainings covering a wide range of topics. In addition, users can filter the trainings by topic, profession, duration, continuing education credits, and more — solving an immediate need for a searchable, centralized place for perinatal mental health trainings to be accessed. MMHLA will continue to work towards a long-term solution that embeds perinatal mental health education within existing curricula and training programs for all professionals who support pregnant and postpartum people.
You can learn more about the database at mmhla.org/database.
