**5. Workforce**

As the Australian private health sector continues to expand, service accountability for identifying and supporting postnatal mental health care will continue to challenge the capacity of these organisations to ensure their workforces are maintained to undertake routine universal postnatal screening and assessment [5, 15]. Australian National standards for perinatal mental health have already been developed and endorsed [6, 15, 37, 45, 46] and currently need to be introduced into the continuous quality improvement processes of private sector facilities in order to meet the Australian hospital accreditation requirements. In addition, private sector providers must increase staff access to continuous professional education/development programmes, to find

#### *Perspective Chapter: Psychosocial Screening and Assessment in the Private Sector in Australia… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.113404*

relevant pathways to collaborative care and ensure that professional and organisational policies and procedures are developed to support this ongoing process [6, 15, 45, 46].

While privately funded obstetric services providers are recommended to encompass the recommendations of the National Guidelines [37] for universal postnatal screening, it appears that application has been widely lacking. The most recent National Perinatal Mental Health Guideline from the Centre of Perinatal Excellence (COPE) [37] has now superseded the initial Beyond Blue Guidelines that were developed and endorsed by NHMRC [6, 45, 46] and this new guideline recommends that ALL hospitals screen and assess women for postnatal mental health risk factors and issues including private obstetric providers. The postnatal period offers an opportunistic time for prevention, promotion, identification, and early intervention of women's mental health. However, there have been inequitable opportunities to support women postnatally within existing systems in training, assessment and referral pathways to continuing care, other than iCOPE training since 2013 [5, 15]. Future private provider services that implement the National Perinatal Health Guideline will necessitate enhanced engagement with specialist postnatal mental health services and also community healthcare and primary healthcare services for sustaining fundamental approaches, functions and activities.
