The federal government has agreed to fund a national trial of a touchscreen-based mental health screening tool for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers-to-be as an alternative to the Edinburgh postnatal depression scale (EPDS).
The Murdoch University-developed Baby Coming – You Ready? project has moved from a paper-based assessment to a digitised one that contains culturally appropriate touchscreen images.
The Murdoch team showed in the early stages of the research that indicators used to identify peri- and post-natal depression were not culturally appropriate for many Aboriginal women and failed to identify those at risk.
