What do you consider to be the main challenges in providing mental health interventions in primary care?
There needs to be an improvement in the interface of primary and secondary mental health care. Mental health services need to be fully integrated creating a seamless pathway to specialist mental health services. There needs to be renewed attention on providing screening and assessment, focusing on early detection and educational programmes.
What Interpersonal skills do you consider to be the most important the provision of high intensity or low intensity psychological interventions?
The skills that I would bring are empathy, mindfulness, and reflection. These skills simultaneously allow us to attune the client as well as filter out the “main points” that the client is trying to convey.
The show of empathy, can to a degree disarm the client by giving them a sense that you have an understanding of their problem. Mindfulness of the situation allows the provider to retain a level of professional detachment from the client and their situation. Reflection gives the opportunity for the provider to periodically offer a summary of the session to the client in order to assure the main issues where properly noted, and if not an opportunity to do so.
How could services be developed to address the mental health needs of people from diverse communities (if possible, draw on your own experience of diverse communities)?
There are three areas which improvement is needed:
• Better quality and more intelligently used information;
• More appropriate and responsive services;
• Increased community engagement
The key to these three areas are community engagement. Without community engagement, the type and quality of information given to the provider concerning the community would be incomplete or inaccurate. This would then lead to deficient drafting of care plans/treatments, and design of local services intended to meet the needs of a multi-cultural...