Empowerindia

The first 1000 days of life are vital for brain growth and development, which is critically contingent on maternal health as well as early infant-mother relationship
Perinatal depression in the mother contributes to poor growth of the child, which can result in low-birth-weight babies, failure to thrive, poor uptake of immunisations and increased hospitalisations
Long term impact - Poor performance in school, low rates of school completion and lower lifetime earnings
The vicious cycle of perinatal depression and its impact on infant growth and early child development is a grave problem in low-and middle-income countries like India
Lack of specialists and significant knowledge gap amongst health personnel leads to treatment gap; ‘Task sharing’ is an innovative strategy to mitigate this treatment gap

The interventions are

Thinking Healthy Program Peer Delivered (THPP) - an evidence-based task sharing intervention for perinatal depression - ASHAs will screen antenatal and postnatal women for depression using Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). Women who are screened positive for perinatal depression will receive the brief 6 to 8 session evidence-based intervention for perinatal depression.
A maternal mental health awareness session will be delivered by trained ASHAs to all the pregnant women in her catchment area
A video-based intervention on early child development delivered by the Anganwadi workers

To provide integrated perinatal mental health and early child development care to the mother-infant dyad during first 1000 days of child’s life (270 days of pregnancy + 730 days of child’s life)
To scale these twin interventions across 8 districts of Madhya Pradesh by digitally training community-based workers (Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and Anganwadi workers) and providing them continuous supervision
Early Child Development (ECD) - Digitized early child development intervention which will be contextually developed for Madhya Pradesh. This intervention will be delivered to all the mother-infant dyads visiting the Anganwadis

EMPOWER SAHARA – building India’s perinatal mental health workforce