Iso Omena maternity and child health clinic and mental health services join forces to help parents

The service is intended for pregnant women and mothers of children under one year of age as well as for the women’s partners. There may be concern about a parent’s mental well-being in general, or the client may need conversational support related to a specific issue, such as termination of pregnancy, stillbirth, miscarriage or infertility treatments. After the nurse has consulted the psychologist, the psychologist will contact the client if necessary. Any follow-up plans are made in cooperation with all the parties involved.

There was a need for this kind of service, as it is important to ensure that at-risk clients are provided with the right services at the right time and that a client actually gets an appointment to access the service she or he needs. The purpose of the service is to improve access to mental health services for this special at-risk group. If a public health nurse has concerns about a client’s current and acute mental health symptoms, it is important to rapidly assess the client’s need for treatment, start treatment and provide an uninterrupted service chain. Sometimes a client does not have the strength to seek help on their own and needs support in doing do.

Innovations with the client’s interests in mind

The jury of the Iso Omena Service Centre’s innovation competition selected the winner on the grounds that the idea has an important target group, the treatment has a wide impact, the service pathway is streamlined, and a client’s comprehensive need for services is assessed through multi-professional cooperation. In addition, the jury felt that the service model could potentially be used with other at-risk client groups.

“The ideas submitted to this year’s competition focused strongly on the client. It was clear that the competing teams strived to create services with the client in mind rather than the administration,” says Service Centre Coordinator Suvi Jäntti.

This was the second innovation competition organised by the Iso Omena Service Centre for its service units. The competition was inspired by the Mayor’s city-wide innovation competition aimed at improving services for the benefit of residents.

The innovation competition is a practical example of the multi-professional development work carried out at the Service Centre. The Service Centre concept is centred around the development of services and cooperation together with service units and other stakeholders. Cooperation enables the creation of more effective services. Ideally, Service Centres can serve as innovation platforms for the development and agile testing of new ideas.