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EMPOWER: Use of digital technology to build India’s Mental Health Workforce
Mental disorders impose an enormous disease burden. On an average, 1 in 4 people suffer from mental or substance use disorder at some point in their lives, and together with neurodegenerative conditions, they account for nearly 20% of the global burden of disease — greater than either cardiac ailments or cancer.
Growing evidence from low- and middle-income countries demonstrates that non-specialist providers, with appropriate training and supervision, can effectively deliver brief psychological treatments for depression. However, scaling up this evidence is hampered by reliance on face-to-face methods for training and supervision and quality assurance barriers.
EMPOWER seeks to address these challenges by building on growing research showing that digital training and supervision are acceptable, cheaper and potentially as effective as traditional approaches. EMPOWER converges two major strands of science: the effective implementation of brief psychological interventions by non-specialist providers and the effectiveness of digital learning and supervision methods. Sangath’s EMPOWER’s mission is to empower anyone, anywhere to master the delivery of evidence-based psychological treatments and behavioral interventions via a digital learning environment.
In particular, EMPOWER builds on the ongoing ESSENCE project being implemented in Madhya Pradesh. EMPOWER aims to build India’s mental health workforce by using digital platforms to enable front-line providers (such as community health workers and nurses) to learn brief psychological interventions, assess their competency and assure quality as they deliver these interventions at scale.
Implementation of this project has drawn attention of non-specialist health workers (NSHWs) in Gujarat who were largely unaware of about the importance of mental health, an alarming challenge in the field of public health. This project inculcated interest as well as knowledge about mental health amongst them. Following three successive workshops the participants were able to gain fundamental insights, developed understanding and enhance their skills related to identifying and treating mental disorders specifically depression. Overall, it can be said that, this project played an important role in capacity building of the existing government health workforce specifically in terms of mental health knowledge.
Additionally, the project is also expected to benefit the health systems by providing an innovative digital training for non-specialist health workers which can be scaled up. This will help reduce the treatment gap for mental disorders, particularly for depression by generating knowledge by designing and evaluating digital interventions for training of NSHWs, and implementation of evidence-based psychosocial interventions at primary health center.
For further details please write to us at contactus@sangath.in
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