A qualitative comparison of experiences of specialist mother and baby units versus general psychiatric wards.

Findings suggest that specialist perinatal inpatient care is considered preferable to generic care in the perinatal period from both service user and staff perspectives. Increased collaboration between perinatal and non-perinatal services could help improve perinatal expertise on general psychiatric wards, while further expansion of perinatal services (e.g. to cater for women currently considered too high risk for MBUs and for those discharged from inpatient settings) could tackle other shortfalls in care.