Partners to Parents: development of an online intervention for enhancing partner support and preventing perinatal depression and anxiety

ABSTRACTObjective: Couples-based interventions to prevent perinatal depression and anxiety are needed to optimise parental well-being and infant mental health. Current interventions are limited by their focus on maternal mental health, postnatal outcomes, and a reliance on professionals for their delivery. This article describes the development of Partners to Parents (http://www.partnerstoparents.org), an online intervention for preventing perinatal depression and anxiety focused on enhancing partner support.Method: Individual usability testing sessions were conducted with 12 parents in the perinatal period (7 women and 5 men) to assess the quality of the website. A deductive coding scheme was applied using NVivo 10 to identify comments relating to system and content quality of the website, as well as positive and negative comments.Results: The results of the usability testing yielded more than 250 comments on system and content quality, potential barriers to accessing the website, and suggestions for imp...