On April 27th to April 29th, healthcare providers, doctors, and parents will be attending the Texas Maternal Mental Health and Wellness Conference to learn more about perinatal mental health of adolescent mothers. As of 2014, there have been 249,078 pregnancies of teens between the ages of 15 and 19. 80% of pregnant women have a change in mental health after giving birth, and only 15% of mothers who have been diagnosed with postpartum depression receive professional treatment. Mental illness can impair your judgment and make you feel like you’re alone, with a baby added to the equation the mental illness itself can intensify, especially as an adolescent, it is important for the health care providers and parents of pregnant adolescents to be prepared and knowledgeable if their daughter does suffer from a perinatal mental illness. Helping healthcare providers and doctors understand the importance of knowledge on this specific issue as well as equipping them with questions to ask and to give to the adolescent mom’s or mom’s to be, is a major component to solving this problem. Along with educating and equipping the health care providers with information as well as questions on the specific issue, we must get the health care providers, the parents of the adolescent mothers, and the general public to really try to understand and care about the issue that is perinatal mental health of adolescent mothers.
In order to solve our problem, we will be presenting our final pieces of information at the Texas Maternal Mental Health and Wellness Conference. In order to inform the participants of the conference about the maternal mental health of adolescents, we plan to shoot a video containing information about the mental health of adolescents and we plan to create booklets containing more information, such as questions to ask adolescents as doctors or parents, where to go for a screening or more information on the topic, how the individual may feel or make their loved ones feel and common phrases and behaviors to look out for that indicate the presence of a mental illness in an adolescent mother.
By creating a video and a booklet we will help healthcare providers and parents understand and become more informed about perinatal mental health issues in their patients and daughters. Some factors that will help us know that our plan is successful is if we make a video we can see how many views we get and we will know it is helping people by likes/dislikes, and if people talk to us through the comments to let us know if it is working. When we create the booklets we will print a certain amount out and have them at our booth at the Texas maternal mental health conference and then at the end of the conference see how many booklets if any we have left. We can also create a survey or have a sign in sheet of people who came to our booth and listened to what we had to say. The survey will tell us what people learned and what they plan to do with the information. The sign in sheet will tell us who and how many people visited our booth. In our video and booklet we hope to cater to what the health care providers and loved ones would like to get out of our solutions. We hope that they find our solutions accurate, engaging, easily appliance to what they are doing, and relevant to the world and our current situations.
Lilly A., Bella T., Vanessa M., Enalisa B.
StarPathDesign 
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