Building Capacity

The Hub for Latin America envisions Community Health Care for individuals with Severe Mental Disorders (CHC-SMD) as an integrated system of primary care and secondary mental health services that are delivered as close as possible to the communities that use them, that are accessible to all people with severe mental disorders and their families, that promote full community integration, and that engage the affected individuals, their families, and their communities in shaping the health services offered to them. Therefore the goals of the Capacity Building Component are to ensure that the HLA has the capacity for launching strategic initiatives that will generate significant progress toward CHC-SMD in the short term (5 year grant period), and second, to build human resources that will sustain ongoing progress. Central to the HLA woric is the notion that the appropriate use of task shifting interventions within and across primary care and secondary mental health services will catalyze progress toward CHC-SMD. Therefore, we give particular attention to building capacity for such interventions in the Capacity Building Component. Although our foremost priority is to train mental health professionals, we also plan to engage and offer practicum experiences to doctors, nurses, social workers, community mental health workers, and peer support workers, who have a key role to play in all these stages. A capacity building program with this scope will best serve our purposes, is feasible, will help prevent fragmentation of training and services between primary and secondary care; wili have a large impact across the HLA region; and will continue to have an impact well beyond the 5 year period of the grant. To achieve the goals of the HLA, the aims of the Capacity Building Component are; (a) to build a self-sustaining regional network of young leaders for the next era; (b) to enhance the capacity of the HLA sites to devise, implement, and evaluate task shifting approaches both within each site and across the sites; (c) to offer a practicum experience in task shifting to general doctors, nurses, social workers, community mental health workers, and peer support workers; and (d) to use innovative approaches for mental health professionals in remote underserved areas to access our capacity building program.