The rise and fall of a psychiatric antenatal clinic: development of a perinatal psychiatric service linked directly to the provision of antenatal care.

Usual referral pathways to psychiatric services can miss opportunities for timely intervention in maternal perinatal psychiatric ill health. Psychiatric illness leading to suicide is a significant factor in at least 10% of maternal deaths. Despite Royal College of Psychiatry and National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence recommendations for specialist provision of perinatal mental health services, this remains sporadic and insufficient. We set out to develop a new integrated antenatal-psychiatric direct referral pathway and present a year of experience using this service model. The psychiatric service was delivered from within the antenatal clinic setting with a direct health-care professional (HCP) led referral pathway between 2003 and 2004. The service comprised one session per week of a senior psychiatric specialist registrar and provided three new patients and two follow-up appointments per week. During this period, a total of 75 referrals to the service were made with 57 individuals attending for an appointment. There was a range of diagnoses among the women who attended, with only 24% meeting eligibility criteria for referral to secondary psychiatric services. The majority diagnosis was depression. More severely ill women were not referred to this clinic by obstetric HCPs. In conclusion, this model for developing and delivering a specialist perinatal psychiatric service using direct links to antenatal medical care was not successful despite requiring minimal funding. Nevertheless, it has been used to inform development of a new perinatal service in keeping with the Royal College of Psychiatrists' recommendations and incorporating enhanced training of HCPs responsible for the referral pathway.