10110477Product development and retrospective validation of a novel Maternal Psychosocial Risk Screening Tool for the personalisation of antenatal care pathways in hospital maternity servicesClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKIn recent years, maternal health disparities have been in the spotlight with criticisms of the NHS, due to disturbing reports of maternal deaths and severe maternal morbidity. In particular, at the intersection between poor perinatal mental health and complex social needs, women living in the most deprived areas have been reported to have a maternal mortality rate more than twice as high as women living in the least deprived areas - a statistically unchanged disparity from 2018-2020 (MBRRACE-UK, 2022). Yet, there are currently no effective means of identifying patients with maternal psychosocial risk during antenatal appointments, to equip clinical teams with the insights they require to appropriately tailor the antenatal care of a patient. The economic impact of undiagnosed or untreated common mental health problems such as perinatal depression is £74,000 per case, of which £23,000 relates to the mother and £51,000 relates to impacts on the child (LSE, Care Policy and Evaluation Centre, 2022). On the other hand, the impact of maternal suicide - the leading cause of direct (pregnancy-related) deaths in the UK (MBRRACE-UK, 2022) - is the immeasurable emotional cost to the family, carers and staff that supported the women who ended up taking their lives. In this Innovate-UK follow-on project, we will determine the feasibility of clinical use of a novel maternal psychosocial screening tool, MpRisk, so that healthcare professionals can more accurately assess and stratify pregnancies, identifying prenatal women at risk of adverse perinatal outcomes and supporting personalised care decisions. We will develop the MpRisk software to generate personalised care pathway recommendations based on its prediction of pregnancy risks, conduct a validation study within two NHS hospitals and carry out regulatory activities to enable MpRisk to ultimately obtain medical device certification for NHS adoption.