Health care professionals' experiences of screening immigrant mothers for postpartum depression – a systematic review

This is the dataset and supplementary material to a study looking at the health care professionals’ experiences of postpartum depression in immigrant mothers. Postpartum depression is considered a major public health problem, which immigrant mothers are at particular risk of being affected by, but it can also have long-lasting traumatic effects on the partner’s health and the child’s health and development. Previous studies have suggested that identifying signs of postpartum depression and performing screening on immigrant mothers is challenging for HCPs, and a meta-synthesis was therefore undertaken to describe their experiences. 

Methods

The databases CINAHL, PubMed, PsycINFO, SocINDEX, Embase, and Cochrane were searched for papers published January 2000–December 2020, reporting qualitative data on immigrants, postpartum depression, and the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. Eight papers representing eight studies from four countries were included and the Critical Appraisal Skills Program was used to assess their quality. The synthesis of studies was guided by Noblit & Hare’s seven-step method based on meta-ethnography. The dataset is the information from the quality appraisal and grid of concepts from the analysis. 

Findings

The synthesis resulted in two final themes: “I do my best, but I doubt that it’s enough” and “I can find no way forward”. The themes convey the fear and frustration that health care professionals experienced; fear of missing mothers with signs of postpartum depression, related to feeling uncomfortable in the cross-cultural setting and frustration in handling difficulties associated with communication, translated versions of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and cultural implications of postpartum depression. 

Conclusions and clinical implication

By supporting HCPs’ self-efficacy in handling cultural implications of postpartum depression and by developing evidence-based clinical guidelines for the use of interpreters and translated versions of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale the screening of immigrant mothers may be facilitated.