Postpartum home-visiting programmes in Zambian catchment areas schedule visits at fixed intervals, yet the detection of perinatal anxiety depends on when a visit falls relative to symptom onset. the present analysis treats the visit interval as an exposure and characterises the operating characteristics of a before-after-control-impact design that emulates a target trial of interval compression. No observational data are used or claimed. Under a declared variance structure with between-cluster standard deviation 6.0, residual standard deviation 4.5 and intraclass correlation 0.64, power was estimated across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. Fifty-four clusters are required for 80% power at a 5-percentage-point effect. The analysis specifies the estimand, the exposure contrast, the detection-window mechanism and the conditions under which the design recovers the interval effect without confounding by catchment-level service capacity. The contribution is a design specification for interval-exposure emulation in community mental health services, not an estimate of effect.
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Chibale et al. (2026) studied this question.
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