Will the Minister outline how the Welsh Government's mental health strategy supports perinatal mental health sufferers in Wales?
Over recent months we have been speaking with stakeholders to develop our understanding of the priorities for mental health policy in Wales. In February 2024, the new draft Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy and the draft Suicide and Self Harm Prevention Strategy were published for consultation.
In the draft Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy we outline our commitment to ensuring that specialist perinatal services are developed to provide the quality of care needed for those with severe and enduring mental health conditions, and to ensure that we make every contact count with expecting and new parents. This aims to provide support across the spectrum of mental health needs. Through the mental health network, we have developed universal pathways that support midwives, health visitors and GPs to promote mental health and emotional wellbeing.
The Draft Strategy outlines the need to develop support for people with mild to moderate perinatal mental health and wellbeing support in universal maternity care, health visiting and the third sector.
The strategy acknowledges that teams should be recovery-focused and have models that are developed on the best evidence available. We need to ensure our community mental health system supports clear referral and recovery pathways into “specialist services”.
The vision set out in the draft strategy is supported by investment in perinatal mental health services since 2015. There are now services in every health board area in Wales and over £3m of mental health service improvement funding is supporting these services annually.
We recognise pregnant women and new mothers as a vulnerable group and the draft Suicide and Self Harm Prevention Strategy commits us to developing capability and response in key settings to ensure support is available.