| | NBCC International (NBCC-I) is currently collaborating with the World Health Organization’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse to train mental health facilitators (MHF) to provide “grassroots” mental health services around the world.
WHO estimates that 450 million people live with significant mental health problems. Moreover, the Mental Health Atlas and other recent reports identify a critical shortage in mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, psychologists, social workers, neurologists, and counselors. Unfortunately, while the need is great, access to effective and equitable mental health care services is substantially limited.
The MHF program addresses this global need for fundamental mental health care through a community-based framework that can be adapted to reflect the social, cultural, economic, and political realities of various countries, regions, or geographic locations. Trained mental health facilitators will bridge the gap between the formal and informal systems of mental health care.
Although NBCC-I has assumed leadership for the development, standardization, and maintenance of the program, the MHF training program draws upon competencies derived from different yet related disciplines including but not limited to psychiatry, psychology, social work, psychiatric nursing, and counseling.
Briefly, mental health facilitation is a trans-disciplinary process that cares for individuals with psycho-social-emotional needs and assists them and their communities in achieving self-determined goals. Increasing the capacity of mental health providers is addressed in the MHF mission statement:
| | To provide equitable access to quality first contact holistic mental health interventions (including mental health promotion/prevention; advocacy; monitoring; referral and treatment), which respect the dignity and human rights of all, meet population needs, and are based on the best available evidence contextualized by current global, regional, or local socio-cultural, economic, and geographic realities. |
MHF program development meetings took place in 2006 in France, Mexico, and India. Participants included mental health subject-matter experts from various countries, leaders of the world’s professional counseling associations, ministers of health, ministers of education, and select experts and policy makers from institutions such as the United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and WHO. Competency areas in the MHF program include helping skills, mental health disorders, disaster/trauma response, community services, and referral to other sectors. In the future, context-specific competencies will be identified and included in MHF training by local stakeholders, thereby reflecting local realities. Consequently,consumers and policy makers can assume that providers who have completed a local MHF training program will provide culturally relevant services. Furthermore, mental health facilitation may be carried out by any individual who successfully completes the MHF training program. For example, MHF providers may be members of non-mental health related professional groups (such as teachers, primary care physicians, public health nurses, community health workers, etc.), or lay community members with no previous training as a public service provider. The MHF training model will provide low- and middle-income countries with a human resource development strategy to effectively and equitably bridge the mental health service-need gap. For more information, visit www.nbccinternational.org |
