Herat, Fri 01 May, 2009

In 2008 PMHP has continued with its mental health training in the provinces of Herat, Badghis and in a district of Ghor (Lal). In addition it started courses in Farah province.

All trainees were given initial courses and then most of them could be monitored and refresher trained individually. New audio-visual training materials have been developed in the project to be used for mental health training at the community level. Through the production and distribution of a mental health magazine mainly for those who had already received mental health training PMHP tried to keep up motivation and mental health knowledge.

In 2008 PMHP has focussed more on mental health awareness rising through conducting short seminars for government officials and through a one week series of mental health programmes in a local TV-station. The project’s mental health Clinic-Resource Centre has continued its activities not only serving many patients and their families but also being a practical training site for medical students, newly graduated doctors and nursing students. These practical trainings have been a main focus of the project and students have become confident to actually carry out mental health care themselves. Counselling and psycho-education activities at the Clinic-Resource Centre carried out by the project’s mental health nurses could be further developed.

2008 Summary

• 4570 out-patients treated (66% women) in 10739 consultations, including counselling sessions.
• 36 primary health care doctors participated in a mental health courses, in addition 10 doctors received a more extensive mental health training enabling them to be mental health focal point doctors.
• 86 monitoring/refresher training sessions were held for trained primary health care doctors. 65 medical students and 35 “stagers” (i.e. newly graduated doctors) participated in practical training in the mental health Clinic-Resource Centre.
• 72 nurses participated in mental health courses and 85 monitoring/refresher training sessions were held. 31 midwifery students were trained at the Institute of Health Sciences (“Nursing school”). 25 nursing students participated in practical mental health training at the mental health Clinic-Resource Centre.