Table 1 Counsellor Interview Questions (not the complete interview)

a. What is your reason for wanting to be a counsellor?

b. What do you think about the week of training that you got before you started counselling?

c. Can you describe your feelings and your story about how things changed from doing the training and when you actually started doing counselling sessions with participants?

d. How did you manage to do counselling sessions in the clinics? For example, speaking to the nurses, getting space to have the sessions?

e. How do you think other nurses and clinic staff accepted you at the clinic? If you could rate their acceptance of you there, between 0 and 10, what number would you give it? 0 (you weren’t accepted) -10 (you were very accepted)?

f. Before you started the sessions what were your fears?

g. How did you rate yourself as a counsellor before you started working on AFFIRM? On a scale of 0 to 10. (Please explain)

h. How would you rate yourself as a counsellor now? On a scale of 0 to 10. (Please explain)

i. What did you find easy when delivering the intervention? Or what made it easy to deliver the intervention?

j. What are the challenges that you faced in delivering the counselling sessions?

k. What can be done to make these challenges easier?

l. What would you say the difference is between working with younger or older clients?

m. How many of your clients had all 6 sessions?

n. What did you notice about the type of clients who were good at coming to sessions and the type of clients who didn’t come?

o. How many people stopped attending sessions?

p. How would they show you that they were no longer interested in attending the sessions?

q. How many clients did not attend any sessions? What were their reasons for non-attendance?

r. How would you explain the different session topics:

 Psycho-education about depression

 Problem solving

 Behaviour Activation

 Healthy thinking

 Psycho-education for birth preparation

Termination and evaluation

s. What do you think was the most effective part of the counselling (the part that helped the mothers most)?

t. Were there particular sessions that you think were most helpful? Which sessions were these?

u. Was there anything particular that you did that helped the mothers to feel more comfortable in the counselling? (If they need examples: e.g. listening, not judging, giving advice, providing a safe confidential place for the mothers to talk, etc.)?

v. Were there any particular sessions, or any particular things that you did that you thought afterwards were not very helpful? If so, what were these?

w. Which was your favourite session and why?

x. Which was your worst session and why?

y. Do you have any suggestions for ways of improving the way that the 6 sessions work?