haPPIE™ SHE Cares: Maternal Mental Health Module
Personalised support, co‑designed with women, delivered at scale
Context & Challenge
Prenatal Care Pressure Points
NHS maternity services are under pressure: rising referrals for pregnant women, workforce burnout, and missed early warning signs during pregnancy.
Opportunity
Shift from reactive crisis care to early, personalised support for pregnant women that builds trust and reduces escalation to serious conditions.
Maternal Mental Health During Pregnancy
Maternal mental health affects 1 in 5 women during pregnancy or postpartum. Pregnant women from Black and Ethnically Minoritized backgrounds face systemic barriers to mental health care during this crucial time.
Pregnancy Distress Identification
Late identification of distress during pregnancy leads to crisis, costly interventions, and loss of trust in prenatal care.
What is haPPIE SHE Cares?
A collaborative personalised maternal mental health support module brought to you by The Essential Baby company Ltd: trusted by women, backed by data, and designed to prevent crisis before it starts.
Developed with over 600 diverse women.
Ongoing input from 40 participants representing historically underserved populations in the mental health sector: refugee women, Caribbean, African, South Asian, all supported by 4 Diverse Community Group Leaders located across Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester and Nottingham.
"We are validating this module not just for emotional benefit—but for crisis prevention, workforce relief, and system trust rebuilding. It's co-designed, clinically aware, digitally scalable, and ready to shift the narrative from late intervention to early, personalised care."
haPPIE SHE Cares collaborators
haPPIE: SHE Cares, an innovative partnership between The Essential Baby Company Ltd (TEBC), Blum Health with ERA Care, Diverse Community Group Leaders (DCGL), The Essential Baby Co CIC (haPPIE Research Group), and Dr. Julian.
Our project creates a culturally sensitive digital and community-based support network for Black and Ethnically Minoritized (BEM) women facing mental health challenges during the perinatal period.
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Supports maternal mental health while enhancing patient and public involvement.
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Enhances existing perinatal mental health pathways to ensure equitable access to care
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Aligns with the ambition to move services out of hospitals into the community while achieving sustainability and net-zero goals.
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The system we are asking to listen
NHS Trusts and Integrated Care Boards are being asked to stabilise maternity services in a context of sustained and compounding pressure. Workforce shortages, rising clinical complexity, persistent inequity in outcomes, long waiting lists, repeated regulatory scrutiny, and disproportionate litigation exposure are no longer episodic challenges. They are structural features of the current system.
At the same time, national policy now requires a decisive shift away from reactive, hospital-centred care towards prevention, early intervention, and support delivered closer to communities. Fit for the Future: the 10-Year Health Plan for England is explicit that long-term sustainability depends on redesigning how and when people access support, not simply expanding capacity within already overstretched services.
Within this context, engagement is no longer a peripheral activity. How and when women are able to disclose distress, raise concerns, and access support materially affects safety, demand, workforce burden, system assurance, and public trust.
haPPIE™ SHE Cares was developed in direct response to this reality.
Engagement redesigned as infrastructure
haPPIE™ SHE Cares applies the haPPIE Equity Engagement™ Framework to this challenge, treating engagement not as an activity but as system infrastructure.
Developed through a nationally competitive SBRI Healthcare Women’s Health award, the programme operates as a complete, governed support pathway outside overstretched Trust and ICB services, with regulated clinical escalation and safe discharge where appropriate. It is designed to hold women safely upstream, improve readiness for care, and escalate only when clinically indicated.
Engagement is delivered through trusted community routes, trauma-aware facilitation, and accessible health literacy resources. Clinical escalation is provided through regulated digital therapy partners operating within NHS-recognised governance and information standards.
"This design directly aligns with the Fit for the Future ambition to reduce avoidable pressure on acute and specialist services through preventive, community-based models of care."
Enhancing Your Existing Perinatal Mental Health Service
If you become our clinical partner, your expertise is crucial to bridging our innovative solution with frontline care. In this project, you would:
Cross-Sector Collaboration
Combining healthcare, mental health, and established community services into one cohesive care pathway via digital platforms.
Trigger-Based Interventions
Using evidence-informed risk criteria to identify at-risk women early and provide tailored postnatal support.
Digital Platforms & Seamless Referrals
Providing scalable self-assessment, online therapy sessions, with unique URL referrals to streamline access and coordination.
Culturally Appropriate Content
Co-produced online resources and monthly community group sessions to challenge stigma and improve health literacy.