Mental health in primary care: Integration through in-service training in a South African rural clinic
African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine
| Field | Value | |
| Title | Mental health in primary care: Integration through in-service training in a South African rural clinic | |
| Creator | Maconick, Lucy Jenkins, Louis S. Fisher, Henriette Petrie, Anthony Boon, Lynnie Reuter, Hermann | |
| Description | Background: Integrating mental health into primary care is a global priority. It is proposed to ‘task-share’ the screening, diagnosis and treatment of common mental disorders fromspecialists to primary care workers. Key to facilitating this is training primary care workers to deliver mental health care. Mental health training in Africa shows a predominance of short-term, externally driven training programmes. Locally, a more sustainable delivery system was needed.Aim: The aim of the study was to develop and evaluate a locally delivered, long-term, inservice training programme to facilitate mental health care in primary care.Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study using mixed methods. The in-service training programme was delivered in weekly 1-h sessions by local psychiatry staff to 20 primary care nurses at the clinic over 5 months. The training was evaluated using quantitative data from participant questionnaires and analysis of the referrals from primary to specialist care. Qualitative data were collected via semi-structured interviews and 14 observed training sessions.Results: The training was feasible and well received. Referrals to the mental health nurse increased in quality and participants’ self-rated competence improved. Additional benefits included the development of supervision skills of mental health nurses and providing a forum for staff to discuss service improvement. The programme acted as a vehicle to pilot integration in one clinic and identify unanticipated barriers prior to rollout.Conclusions: Long-term, in-service training, using existing local staff had benefits to the integration of mental health into primary care. This approach could be relevant to similar contexts elsewhere. | |
| Publisher | AOSIS | |
| Date | 2018-05-24 | |
| Identifier | 10.4102/phcfm.v10i1.1660 | |
| Source | African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine; Vol 10, No 1 (2018); 7 pages 2071-2936 2071-2928 | |
| Language | eng | |
| Relation |
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:
https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/1660/2534
https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/1660/2533
https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/1660/2535
https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/1660/2514
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