It can be challenging at the best of times for a new mother to navigate the health system and deal with problems such as postpartum depression.
Throw in pandemic-induced isolation from family, friends and support groups and those challenges can become even more daunting.
Halifax researchers are asking new mothers in the Maritime provinces to pass along their experiences in an online survey.
“Basically we’re interested in looking at their postpartum experience during the COVID outbreak,” said project lead Justine Dol, who is a doctoral student in the PhD in Health program at Dalhousie University.
“Typically postpartum women will have . . . the option of in-person visits from public health nurses but due to COVID, a lot of this has turned to telehealth or virtual calls.”
Many women also get support at meetings of new mother groups, where they can engage directly with people who are in a similar life stage.
“But a lot of these have also turned virtual or been cancelled out altogether so we’re just interested in the experience that the lack of these in-person supports that mums would have, that they’re missing now due to COVID.”
Online survey
Dol and her colleague Brianna Richardson, who is a doctoral student in Dalhousie’s nursing department, have created an online survey as part of their study.
It will include questions about postpartum experience as well as basic demographic questions to help understand the background of mothers who complete the survey.
“This information will help us better understand mom’s experience after birth during COVID-19 and identify potential areas that could be improved to support mothers across the Maritimes," said Dr. Marsha Campbell-Yeo, a clinician scientist at the IWK and a Dalhousing nursing professor, who is supervising Dol and Richardson’s study, in a news release.
The researchers conducted a similar study last fall, in which about 560 mothers related their postpartum experiences and satisfaction with the medical services they received.
While about 75 per cent were happy with their interactions with the health system, about 20 per cent were not satisfied with things like access to information and services.
The purpose of the latest study “is to explore the relationship between mothers’ self-efficacy, social support, anxiety, depression, newborn pain management knowledge, and their health information seeking behaviour during the six-month period after giving birth during COVID-19,” Richardson said in the release.
About 5.5 per cent of Canadian women experience postpartum depression, according to a recent University of Toronto study, Dol said.
The same study found the prevalence of PPD was lowest in the Maritime provinces. The survey will aim to determine whether such problems have been magnified by the pandemic environment.
Participants will be asked questions such as how often they were seen by a health-care provider, whether it was in-person or virtual. Problems such as depression and anxiety are often first spotted by family and friends, so the researchers will try to tease out whether that remained the case given the isolation effects of the pandemic.
“I would like to encourage all mums to really share their experience, whether you’re early post-partum or around six months. It’s all really helpful in terms of helping guide the findings and what’s going on in the Maritimes,” Dol said, noting that participants will get a chance to win one of three $300 Amazon gift cards.
The survey, which closes Oct. 31, will be available at https://tinyurl.com/momlinc-covid.
