The PMHP provides a holistic mental health service to women at maternity facilities. To create an effective environment for this service to run, the Project actively builds capacity among nursing staff.

The service approach has two complimentary components:

1. PMHP beneficiaries are women and girls from the townships and informal settlements around the Cape Town area who are affected by poverty, HIV/AIDS, violence, abuse, social exclusion and refugee status.

2. Professional and lay health workers also benefit from PMHP services, as do undergraduate and postgraduate students in nursing, midwifery, public health and medicine. By working upstream with mothers in distress, the PMHP intervention provides a protective and preventative intervention to contribute to positive early childhood and adolescent development.

A lot of women come from homes where there is a lot of poverty, people are unemployed, there is abuse happening within their homes, there’s drug abuse, there’s violence, they come from areas where there’s lots of crime - they're always being intimidated.