Lights, Camera, Action!

One of the biggest barriers to linking depressed and anxious new moms with the professional help they need is lack of routine screening, education and referral. This is changing in England and Australia where many hospitals already conduct perinatal depression screening programs. At Cedars-Sinai things are also changing. In April 2017 we initiated the new Postpartum Depression (PPD) Screening, Education and Referral Program. This Program received some local media attention last year, see more in my blog post from OCTOBER. With a lot of collaboration and dedication from 4 Departments across Cedars, I am thrilled to report that as of December our screening rate was 99% and remains so! 

Screening alone won’t help. And educating alone won’t help. Nurses, social workers & other professionals like OBGYN doctors and pediatricians must be trained to conduct the screening, education AND referral process properly. So we teamed up with Maternal mental health Now and made a PPD Screening Training video! 

Some of the tips for screening include:

1. Take a deep breath before you enter the patient’s room as you are about to take her emotional “vital signs”
2. Make eye contact
3. If the patient is in her hospital bed or sitting, try sitting at her level if possible
4. Make sure she understands each question
5. Take your time, this will only take 5 minutes

As we prepared this training video we took into account the initial questions from Cedars nursing staff. One nurse wondered what to do in case a husband, mother-in-law or older child was in the room, “Should I go ahead and ask the questions anyways?” she asked?

No – it is very important to “prepare the room” and allow a new mom to be 100% comfortable to endorse the items.

Another nurse followed up by asking, “How exactly do we politely ask these family members to leave?” and “What do we say if she worries we will call child protective services if she does endorse an item?”

These are all excellent and very important questions. Our training video is finished! It includes the answers to these critical questions (including limits to confidentiality) and several interviews about the protocol, including with an OBGYN doctor, a social worker and a patient representative and will GO LIVE to train the 100’s of Postpartum and Maternal Fetal Care Unit nurses at Cedars next month!

Here is the first minute of the role-model segment of the training video. 

For the full 10 minute video please go to Maternal Mental Health NOW's website, and inquire with the Training Director, Gabrielle Kaufman if it has not yet been made available to the public.
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Thanks for watching!