Foundation to boost mental health care
The Managing Director, Gede Foundation, John Minto, has said his organization is ready to work with the federal government to integrate screening and treatment of mental ailment into the primary health care service.
Speaking after a training on behavioural change and research methodology on capacity building for health care agencies and NGOs, he said the big thing this year for the foundation is to work with the government to integrate issues of mental care in primary health at the community level, adding that they were in a working relationship with the Federal Ministry of Health and the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) to make sure that mental health is in the HIV national strategic framework.
“We want to work with the government to see how to get mental health to the community level because the problem we have in Nigeria is that those that need mental health care are scared of going to the tertiary facilities. They go to the big hospitals and there really should be community based mental health care which is what the government is pushing for,” he said.
One of the facilitators, the Dean, Faculty of Social Science, Nasarawa State University and the President, Nigeria Psychological Association, Professor Andrew Zamani said, “There has been a gap between researchers and policy makers. Research in Nigeria is not serving developmental purpose at all, so in order to create a very strong nexus between the academia and public sector we felt that building capacity of people who are working in developmental agencies is the right thing to do”.
He said the training was influenced by the prevalence of mental health disorder in Nigeria.
“When you go back to the books you discover that there are no appropriate policies to checkmate this development. We also discovered that most of the data upon which the initial mental health laws of Nigeria were framed are outdated. They cannot be used for policy at all. The little evidence that is available is from individual research effort in isolated communities which do not have national relevance,” he said.