For Providers
As the provider, you can play an important role in helping your patients develop their plan.
How to Use the Thrive Guide
The Thrive Guide is a self-empowerment tool for parents, a plan for where to go and what to do when feeling overwhelmed and under pressure.
The Thrive Guide may be used to facilitate conversations with your patients about their mental health. You can provide this guide at any time in your patients’ care to help them develop a personalized support plan for their journey into and throughout motherhood.
The Thrive Guide encourages users to create a plan with their providers in the event that their mental health becomes too challenging. Set expectations with your patients so they know how to navigate the process of getting the help they need. Is a portal message enough to initiate care? Is there a direct nurse line? What is the number? How can they most efficiently contact you, their provider, when they need you? Reducing these barriers may help patients reach out sooner.
What Moms are Saying
During prenatal care for my second pregnancy, my doctor and I discussed my experiences with postpartum anxiety after my first child was born. She offered reassurance and let me know how I could most easily reach her if I had these experiences again. After my second child was born, I was able to send a portal message to initiate the care I needed when I needed it. I had a plan so I didn’t hesitate to reach out like I had before.
It can be so intimidating reaching out and calling numbers when you're in the middle of a panic attack. Had I gotten familiar with what's out there ahead of time, I wouldn't have hesitated so much, which ultimately made things worse. But I didn't think I was going to have the problems I had so I had no plan.
Other Perinatal Mental Health Resources
PMH Connect: Perinatal Mental Health Resource and Connection Sheet
Through the simplicity of a one page information sheet with embedded QR codes linking to a resource webpage, the PMH Connect provides brief anticipatory guidance about PMH symptoms, normalizing trauma-informed language about prevalence, and provides a connection to resources in a supportive, unobtrusive manner. This tool centers pregnant people and parents as valued experts on their own care team, a step toward addressing barriers contributing to disparities in PMH screening, assessment and treatment by improving patients’ experiences and outcomes.
EPDS-US: Perinatal Mental Health Screening Form
How we talk about perinatal mental health matters, even in the minute details of words on screening forms. In the EPDS-US, we have adapted the wording of the original Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), using a respectful care and trauma-informed approach with a focus on optimizing patient experiences and clinical utility while maintaining reliability and validity of the 10 item scale.