Community mental health care - a key focus of Public Health

Community mental health care — a key focus of Public Health

Jul 19, 2017 News

– Mental Health Director

The public health sector has been making considerable strides to expand its services. Included in this movement is a plan to ensure that mental health services are offered countrywide. Speaking of moves in this regard was

Dr. Util Richmond-Thomas

Director of the Ministry of Public Health’s Mental Health Unit, Dr. Util Richmond-Thomas.
According to Dr. Richmond-Thomas, on Monday, the Public Health Ministry has been steadfastly fast-tracking its efforts to have in place community mental health care, countrywide.
This strategic move, she explained, is designed to help reduce the burden on institutions such as the National Psychiatric Hospital and the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation. The latter institution has in place a specialised psychiatric unit.
Reducing the burden on these institutions, Dr. Richmond-Thomas said, will essentially be realised by the placement of doctors trained to handle mental health cases at all regional health facilities.
“These doctors will be able to detect problems early and take care of those problems…” said Dr. Richmond-Thomas as she noted that once the problems are recognised and dealt with at an early stage patients are not likely to reach to a place where they have to be institutionalised.
But even though the intent is to have a mental health service with a national reach, Dr. Richmond-Thomas said that keen efforts have been made to ensure that areas such as Regions Six, Three and Two are well staffed.
This may be in light of the fact that these Regions, particularly Six and Two, have been high on the Ministry’s suicide prevention radar.
Dr. Richmond-Thomas was asked whether even more focus will be placed on the sugar production Regions [Six and Four] in light of moves by Government to scale down the production of sugar thus rendering some persons unemployed and possibly vulnerable to depression.
But the measures already in place should suffice. According to the Mental Health Unit Director, in Region Six, for instance, 14 doctors have been trained and are stationed at health centres throughout the Region.
“They are there to screen and make sure that persons who come in with [signs] of mental health illnesses can be taken care of very early…their depression will be taken care of and coping skills will be taught,” Dr. Richmond-Thomas assured.
A similar situation obtains in Region Three, she added. Already, she disclosed, as many as 25 doctors have been trained in Region Three and “these doctors are working in primary health care. Even though Region Three doesn’t have a psychiatrist, they are trained to deal with depression, psychosis, with anxiety and so on. So persons can go to any one of the 23 health centres where these doctors are and be adequately attended to.”
While Region Six and Three are very capable to efficiently manage any potential mental health case, Dr. Richmond-Thomas said that moves will shortly be made to also commence training of doctors in Region Two even as efforts in this regard are further expanded.
She, however, noted that while mental health specialists are needed at the country’s main referral hospital – GPHC— expanding the service there is not currently a priority since the GPHC Psychiatric Department has been effectively catering to this need.
“At the GPHC when someone comes in [to the Accident and Emergency Unit] with an issue [mental health problem] the [attending doctors] will call the psychiatric resident on call. Of course it would be better to have the doctors at the Accident and Emergency trained but there is that specialised unit and therefore it is not so urgent right now,” Dr. Richmond-Thomas emphasised.
Meanwhile, at the regional facilities she noted, “as patients come in, the doctors who are trained will be able to recognise mental health problems…the patients may not even know that they have a condition but the doctor will detect it and manage it properly.”
However, Minister within the Ministry of Public Health, Dr. Karen Cummings, has noted that while the Public Health Ministry has been moving full speed ahead with its agenda to expand the delivery of mental health services, the Ministry cannot work in isolation. “This cannot be done by Public Health alone; it has to be a multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary approach.
We have to work with Social Protection, we have to work with Public Security and so forth, and we hope that with this kind of approach we will be able to achieve that and look at the social determinants of health,” said Dr. Cummings.