“mhGAP” Training the Trainers course recently completed
We are delighted that Jamie’s Fund has been able to sponsor a course at Butabika National Hospital in Kampala from the 20thto 24thAugust 2018 to train trainers to teach the WHO “mental health GAP” programme. This approach enables clinical staff who are not specialists in mental health to be more aware of the importance of mental illness, how to identify it and begin treatment for individual patients who come to their general clinics.
We were encouraged by the enthusiasm of psychiatric staff from across Uganda who attended. They came from nine different hospitals. We work with Kisiizi, Bwindi and Kagando, but have only just become aware that the other six each have one or two specialist mental health staff or are hoping to develop their services.
One of the outcomes of the training was that the participants have set up a mental health staff support network, as some of them are working in relative isolation. This gives us the possibility of providing further postgraduate training for them as a professional group.
The training was expertly organised and run by Joshua Ssebunnya, a clinic psychologist working at Butabika and Makerere University who has a lot of relevant experience.