Pregnancy care for vulnerable women is often perceived as a burden by caregivers as
vulnerable clients require complex case management, additional time, and more often show
adverse perinatal outcomes. Vulnerable clients bring about additional work strain for the
caregiver, especially when the workload is high. We define client vulnerability as
coexistence of psychopathology, psychosocial problems or substance use, together with
features of deprivation. We investigated, as part of a national program, whether the
subjective caregiver’s perception of workload and the objective registry-based caseload of
vulnerable clients are in agreement, and whether a structured organization of antenatal risk
management reduces the burden associated with the perceived workload, in particular if
the objective caseload is high.