Abstract
The perinatal period is a critical time for mental health and is also associated with high health care expenditure. Our previous work has identified a history of poor mental health as the strongest predictor of poor perinatal mental health. This study aims to examine the impact of a history of poor mental health on health care costs during the perinatal period. Data from the 1973–1978 cohort of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (ALSWH) were linked with a number of administrative datasets including the NSW Admitted Patient Data Collection and Perinatal Data Collection, the Medicare Benefits Scheme and the Pharmaceuticals Benefits Scheme between 2002 and 2011. Even when taking birth type and private health insurance status into account, a history of poor mental health resulted in an average increase of over 11% per birth across the perinatal period. These findings indicate that an investment in prevention and early treatment of poor mental health prior to child bearing may result in a cost saving in the perinatal period and a reduction of the incidence of women experiencing poor perinatal mental health.
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Acknowledgements
The research on which this paper is based was conducted as part of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health by the University of Queensland and the University of Newcastle. We are grateful to the Australian Government Department of Health for funding and to the women who provided the survey data. We acknowledge the Department of Health and Medicare Australia for providing the PBS and MBS data. We also acknowledge the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) as the integrating authority for these data. The authors thank the NSW Ministry of Health, the NSW Central Cancer Registry and staff at the Centre for Health Record Linkage (CHeReL).
Funding
The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health. The analysis reported in this paper received no funding.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Chojenta, C., William, J., Martin, M.A. et al. The impact of a history of poor mental health on health care costs in the perinatal period. Arch Womens Ment Health 22, 467–473 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-018-0912-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-018-0912-4