Cardiff & Vale Perinatal Mental Health Team

Aims of the Cardiff PNMHT

The Perinatal Mental Health service is a community-based service providing specialist mental health assessment and treatment of women during the perinatal period. The service also provides training, education and clinical consultation to the wider professional network. The service covers all areas of the health board.

Our vision is to care for our communities and patients by preventing ill health, promoting better health, providing excellent services. Reducing the need for inpatient care wherever possible through the provision of strengthened home, primary and community care.

The service is developed in-line with Royal College of Psychiatry Guidance and NICE guidelines as per expectations outlined by the Welsh Assembly Government following the National Enquiry into Perinatal Mental Health Services in Wales 2017. This led to the development of the Wales Perinatal Mental Health Programme. There are seven health boards across Wales all of which now have a Perinatal Mental Health community service. 

Whilst there are many similarities across all mental health settings within a Specialist Perinatal Mental Health Team we must consider not only the mother but also the needs of the infant, fathers, partners and any other family members involved. This will ensure a whole-family approach to Perinatal Mental Health.

The potential risk of untreated perinatal mental illness can have long-ranging consequences in terms of the parent-infant relationship and can be linked to long-term difficulties throughout childhood including behavioural difficulties, conduct and attachment disorders and mental health difficulties and a perpetuating cycle of health inequalities.

In all this, we must also remember the impact that these experiences may have on the baby/child’s development. Young babies and children experience their world as an environment of relationships, and these relationships affect virtually all aspects of their development – intellectual, social, emotional, physical, behavioural, and moral. It is the quality and stability of a child’s human relationships in the early years that lay the foundation for a wide range of later developmental outcomes that really matter.