Exploring the psychometric properties of the professional issues in maternal mental health scale (PIMMHS) in a Chinese population

BACKGROUND: The public health and economic implications of perinatal mental health problems are well documented. Maternity clinicians are ideally placed to effectively identify women at risk and facilitate early intervention. However, in China as globally a number of issues are implicated in a failure to recognise and treat. AIM: The present study sought to develop and evaluate the Chinese version ‘professional issues in maternal mental health’ scale (PIMMHS), explore its psychometric properties and potential application. METHODS: A cross-sectional design and instrument translation and evaluation approach was taken to investigate the psychometric properties of the PIMMHS in a Chinese population. A total of 598 obstetricians, obstetric nurses, and midwives participated in this study from 26 hospitals across China. FINDINGS: The Chinese PIMMHS was not a good fit to the original two factor model. The emotion/communication subscale yielded an excellent fit to the data according to all fit indices, offering compelling evidence for a single factor solution. The training (PIMMHS: Training), proved problematic throughout the analysis with divergent validity for the training subscale also being poor with a concomitant impact on the total scale performance. The performance of this subscale may be related to the nature of medical training and PMH. CONCLUSION: The Chinese PIMMHS comprises a unidimensional scale of emotion/ communication, which is simple and may provide insight into the emotional burden of providing PMH care, with the potential to mitigate that burden. Further development and investigation of the training sub-scale could be of value.