When mothers need more: Postnatal care and complex social needs

Today, we’re speaking to Dr Clare Macdonald, an Academic Clinical Lecturer in General Practice based at the University of Birmingham.

Title of paper: Complex social needs and maternal postnatal care: what can primary care do?

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2026.0069

Throughout the discussion we use the terms ‘woman’ and ‘women’, but we know that not all those who give birth will identify as women and intend this to mean all those who give birth.

Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.

Speaker A

00:00:00.480 - 00:00:51.740

Hello and welcome to BJ GP Interviews. I'm Nada Khan and I'm one of the Associate Editors of the Journal. Thanks for listening to this podcast today.

In today's episode, we're speaking to Dr. Claire MacDonald. Claire is an academic clinical lecturer in general practice, and she's based at the University of Birmingham.

We're here today to talk about the editorial she's just published in the May issue of the bjgp, and it's titled Complex Social Needs and Maternal Postnatal Care. What Can Primary Care Do?

So, hi, Clare, it's lovely to meet you and to talk about this brilliant editorial, but before we get into the editorial itself, I wonder if you can just talk us through what you actually mean by complex social needs in the context of postnatal care.