Strengthening Maternal Mental Health Care: PROMISE Trial and SALT Africa Launch Training Initiatives

The PROMISE trial partnered with ‘Someone Always Listen To you (SALT) Africa’, an organisation which specialises in maternal mental health through offering counselling, bereavement therapy, and perinatal mental health support, to convene a two-day training workshop for Harare City Health staff. The initiative invited two nurses from each PROMISE Polyclinic, with a total of 28, for the opportunity to be trained on maternal mental health and bereavement counselling.

The main objective of the training was to equip health care professionals to identify maternal distress and provide empathetic mental health counselling and bereavement support at a clinical level, enhancing existing efforts currently being done in the clinics. While healthcare workers are already highly competent in delivering general health education, maternal mental health remains an area that is often under-addressed despite the complex and deeply personal experiences women go through during pregnancy and childbirth. Many of these experiences, including obstetric challenges and postpartum depression, warrant mental health support that is not always provided as part of comprehensive care.

Recognising the heavy workload carried by nurses and midwives, the training also emphasised the importance of practicing self-regulation to manage their own wellbeing.

Importantly, the group also engaged in forward-looking discussions on what would be required to implement mental health counselling in their clinics, grounded in a realistic “what can we do with what we have” approach.

Overall, the training reinforced the importance of collaborative planning around maternal mental health support and its health system implications.