Healthy Activity Program (Scale-up)

Healthy Activity Programme scale-up

Of the 50 million people living with depression in India, fewer than 10% have to adequate care and virtually 0% have access to brief, evidence-based psychological treatment. India’s mental healthcare system which reaches less than 5% population, is greatly under-resourced to meet the increasing demand of mental health problems. There is huge shortage of mental health workforce (per 100,000 population), much lower than in developed countries such as the US e.g., psychiatrists (0.3 in India vs 10.54 in the US), nurses (0.8 vs 4.28), psychologists (0.07 vs 29.86) and social workers (0.06 vs 60.34). This paucity of mental health services is much starker in non-metropolitan cities and rural areas translating into a treatment gap of 95% for common mental disorders.

In this project, we will utilize a sustainable digital platform to scale up evidence-based psychological interventions for mental health problems through enabling front-line providers to learn, master and deliver these interventions with assured quality. Through this project, we plan to train frontline heath workers – Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) to deliver the Healthy Activity Program (HAP), a 6-8 session psychological treatment for adults with depression in 3 underserved rural districts of Madhya Pradesh- Raisen, Vidisha, and Hoshangabad.

The project aims to:

To train at least 1000 frontline health workers in evidence-based psychological care provision as part of globally accepted ‘task shifting’ strategy, for treatment for depression.
To train the key stakeholders at the district and state health authority in highest quality standards of community mental health care through capacity-building training courses (Leadership in Mental Health).

The project is expected to play an important role in the capacity building of the existing government health workforce specifically in terms of mental health knowledge towards delivering evidence based mental health care. It is also expected to potentially increase the access to evidence-based psychological treatments to underserved rural communities.

Additionally, the project is also expected to benefit the health system by providing an innovative digital training for frontline health workers which can be further scaled up. We hope 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 in primary health care in collaboration with the Health Department, Government of Madhya Pradesh.