Group Pregnancy Care: Improving Access, Health Literacy and Social Inclusion.
Murdoch Children’s Research Institute
Refugee women are at risk of poor maternal and perinatal outcomes, and face multiple barriers accessing pregnancy and early childhood health care. In response to these issues, a partnership co-designed and tested an innovative approach to antenatal and postnatal care that involves inter-agency collaboration between public maternity hospitals, settlement services and maternal
and child health services. Community engagement with the Karen Community (from Burma) underpinned the design of the model.
The new trauma-informed model of care provides multidisciplinary, culturally appropriate preventative health care in a community based group setting. Evaluation with women has demonstrated positive benefits informing scale-up and expansion with other communities and services.
