Jamie

Jamie’s Fund was established in 2013 in memory of Jamie Devaney.  Jamie died while on a visit to Uganda with his parents. Jamie’s parents were keen that people should continue to be inspired and blessed by Jamie’s life. You can read Jamie’s story here, and his parents’ reflections on his legacy here.

Over the past ten years, Jamie’s Fund has:

• developed partnerships with twenty-five hospitals affiliated to the Uganda Protestant or Catholic Medical Bureaus, to develop community mental health services. Many of these hospitals now list “mental health care” as one of the services the hospital offers, and run clinics at least weekly.
• enabled the rollout of the WHO training “mhGAP”. We trained trainers from all our partner hospitals. They then organised 39 mhGAP courses, training 1031 clinical staff from their hospitals and nearby health centres.
• worked with local Ugandan colleagues to develop a one-day course for community leaders. This addressed the considerable stigma and misinformation in the community about the causes and treatment of mental illness. We have supported the training of more than 1000 community leaders by funding 30 courses.
• sponsored seven nurses to train as psychiatric clinical officers (PCO’s) at Butabika. They will return to lead mental health services in their hospitals.

We have heard many stories of the difference that the training we have supported has made. In some hospitals, following mhGAP training, the whole approach to mental illness changed, as staff awareness of mental ill-health has improved.

As a result of the community leaders’ sensitisation course, local leaders have been surprised to discover that disturbed people, who they often find difficult to support and keep safe, could be helped by coming to the hospital. This has resulted in a steady trickle of people being brought to partner hospitals where they can be treated appropriately.

There is much still to be done in developing mental health care in Uganda, and we are pleased to entrust it to the hard working and committed healthcare staff that we have had the privilege of working with in Uganda.

Relevant media

More details of the Jamie’s Fund model can be read here.

Establishing community mental health clinics increased the number of patients receiving care in rural Western Uganda. Kuule, Y., Dobson, A. E., Mutahunga, B., Stewart, A. G., & Wilkinson, E. (2023) Frontiers in Health Services,

A short video on the professional development workshop held in Kampala in September 2023 is here 

This is a video of a presentation by Prof. Maureen Wilkinson given to the Liverpool University Psych Soc.in 2021.  In it she describes her career, and how she developed the approach to rural African community mental care, which we then used in Jamie’s Fund.