The locally available service mix to enhance the coordination of support services for pregnant women
Today's blog post is going to cover a piece of work we are currently doing in collaboration with Acacia Ridge Community Support Inc. For those not familiar with what 'service mapping' is, it is essentially a stocktake of available services in the local community to better understand what is available. In this case, we have focussed on services that are either specific to the prenatal period or are relevant for pregnant women to access during a pregnancy. Why are we doing this you ask? We are wanting to document and articulate the many services available to the local community to make it easier for people to access services. Knowing where and how to access services can be daunting for anyone and the service model we are proposing will aim to make accessing services as easy as possible for pregnant women in the local Acacia Ridge community.
We don't want to bore you so we will spare you the details and hit you with the main findings straight off the bat.
What we’ve found
1: The Acacia Ridge community has a well-established network of service access points for pregnant women and families. These services either currently provide services to pregnant women or pregnant women regularly access their service for a variety of reasons.
2: The Acacia Ridge community has a lack of specialist support to meet the full spectrum of social and health needs of pregnant women in the area. This may include support services such as mental health, drug and alcohol treatment, employment, housing and many more.
3: The communities surrounding Acacia Ridge have a wide variety of support services available. These support services cover the broad spectrum of the health and social support needs of local pregnant mothers. These services need to be utlised effectively by the Acacia Ridge community either through outreach or co-location.
4: There are many available state-wide services available to complement tailored care and support to pregnant women in Acacia Ridge. Many of these services are free at the point of use and can be used as a key strategy to foster ongoing support during the prenatal period.
Service mapping
What we have done in this part of the report is detail the specific service types that the evidence review (still in the works...) supports as effective strategies to improving pregnancy experience and birth outcomes. We've categorised the available services in the community under the headings below. What we are aiming to do is create linkages between service types, matched to the need of the individual and/or family. So here we go, in no particular order we have documented the service details of the following:
Local service providers and outreach opportunities
Domestic violence
Housing
Clinical care
Nutrition and physical wellness
Drugs, alcohol and smoking cessations
Employment, education and training
Mental health and resilience
Parenting and attachment
Financial security
Legal issues
Healthy relationships
Provision of goods
This will all make a lot more sense when we release the 'evidence review' document in the near future. The evidence review will detail each component of the service model and align it with academic evidence. We will also acknowledge that much of this work has been captured through desktop review of which has it's limitations. We urge any service providers who we have missed or have misrepresented to please get in contact with us.
Next steps
It is the intention of this project going forward that deeper engagement will occur with each service provider as needed. It is planned that this information will be stored centrally in a cloud-based database to be used by service coordinators throughout the duration of any potential care coordination initiative in Acacia Ridge and surrounding areas.
We have now completed two core components of our work with Acacia Ridge Community Support Inc. In the near future you can expect us to release the evidence review (which will document the service model and align it to evidence - for all the nerds our there) and most importantly the results of some community conversations that we have been having with mothers in the local Acacia Ridge community.
Stayed tuned!