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Utilizing longitudinal qualitative strategies, the examine regarded on the care pathways for girls who’re depending on medication perinatally. The paper focuses on ladies’s experiences of care prenatally, and highlights their anxiousness regarding social work referrals and the potential lack of their infants to the care system.
Revealed in The British Journal of Social Work, the examine’s findings might have implications for a way companies have interaction with ladies who use medication within the perinatal interval and name for approaches which can be attentive to the wants of ladies and people of their infants. Alongside King’s Faculty London, the examine crew comprised of researchers from the College of Stirling, College of Huddersfield and Homerton Well being Care.
There’s little data of how ladies who use and are in therapy for utilizing medication within the perinatal interval expertise multidisciplinary companies prenatally. This examine used qualitative longitudinal strategies to discover ladies’s experiences of care in 4 websites in England and Scotland. Thirty-six ladies who used and have been in therapy for drug use (opioid, stimulants and benzodiazepines) have been recruited by way of maternity companies. Importantly, most individuals, for whom this was not their first maternity, had had earlier kids faraway from their care.
The findings concentrate on ladies’s experiences of surveillance and uncertainty surrounding referrals to social companies, social work assessments and attainable elimination of infants. Analysis individuals reported managing the stigma of therapy for opioid use and its affiliation with illicit drug use.
The pattern included individuals who had skilled a spread of co-occurring and interrelated bodily and psychological well being issues, intimate companion violence and histories of kid abuse. Ladies incessantly reported emotions of guilt and disgrace regarding their drug use, anxiousness regarding the impacts of drug use and therapy on their infants and uncertainty regarding social care choices about whether or not they would retain care of their infants.
“We carried out longitudinal interviews with women who were in treatment for drug use in pregnancy in four sites in England and Scotland. In this paper we explore their experiences of services prenatally. Women who had had previous children removed from their care were particularly anxious about social services involvement in this pregnancy,” mentioned first writer Dr. Polly Radcliffe, Senior Analysis Fellow, Division of Addictions Sciences, King’s IoPPN.
“Despite longstanding recommendations for trauma informed care for this group of women, our findings illustrate that multi-agency, child protection led approaches can retraumatize already anxious women prenatally, are experienced as intrusive and overwhelming, and may be counterproductive.”
Members described being topic to multi-agency monitoring and there have been few examples of trauma knowledgeable care on the level of supply. Though it’s now a cliché to counsel that being pregnant for many who use and are in therapy for drug use is a “window of opportunity” for drug therapy companies, this examine discovered that whereas being pregnant had been the impetus for partaking with substance use and maternity companies, for others the fears of social companies involvement and former expertise of getting a baby eliminated led them to concealing their substance use.
The findings of this examine have implications for a way multi-agency companies have interaction with ladies who use medication and name for approaches which can be attentive to their wants and people of their infants. By attending in a rigorous and delicate option to the fears and hopes of those ladies, and highlighting the structural challenges that they face, the analysis incorporates essential pointers for practices that don’t additional reinforce their marginalization and promote humane and socially simply approaches.
As a part of embedding this consciousness in observe, researchers have been utilizing transcripts with ladies from the examine because the catalyst for work with Outdoors Edge Theatre Firm, to provide a bit of theatre that hopes to construct connection and understanding on this space. The piece will probably be carried out for audiences of midwifery and social work college students and practitioners in London and Sheffield in December 2026.
Extra info:
Polly Radcliffe et al, Navigating surveillance: The expertise of prenatal ladies who use or who’re in therapy for utilizing medication, The British Journal of Social Work (2025). DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/bcaf161
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King’s Faculty London
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Exploring experiences of surveillance in prenatal ladies who use or who’re in therapy for utilizing medication (2025, August 15)
retrieved 15 August 2025
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