Adapting the mhGAP/IPT-G Integrated Mental Health Care Training to a Remote/Distance Digital Training to Support Mental Health Service Needs in Kenya under COVID-19 Context (INSPIRE for COVID) The number of patients who have contracted SARS- COV-1 virus disease is increasing every day in Kenya just like many other countries.The INSPIRE study (K43 TW010716-03), with aim to integrate mhGAP and evidence-based mental health intervention (IPT-G) for pregnant adolescents in primary maternal child care (MCH) service, is now about to begin its third year and we have begun our mhGAP community toolkit and intervention trainings for community health workers and health facility staff. However, due to COVID-19 pandemic, mental health problems in Kenyan has been increased significantly, and clinical services and patients? access to care have been disrupted. For our implementation study, carrying out in-person training/support for health care workforce and providing in-person counseling/ intervention sessions for adolescents/families are also facing many challenges due to transportation restriction, financial lose, and other logistic barriers. In response to the increased mental health needs and service provision challenges, the Kenyan Ministry of Health (MOH) is seeking for eHealth and telemedicine solutions to provide timely mental health training for health care workers and mental health care to vulnerable adolescents and women. Therefore, developing technology solutions for training primary care workforce to provide mental health care are urgently needed. The overarching aim of this proposed 1-year supplemental research is to respond to the public health and our research needs by adapting our current face-to-face training for the mhGAP/ group-based mental health intervention (IPT-G) to a web/video/eHealth- version of training, and studying whether the technology-delivered version of mhGAP/IPT-G training is feasible and useful to support health workforce and community mental health needs.
Pregnant adolescents in Sub-Saharan-African (SSA) are burdened by significant unmet health needs including lack of access to mental health services. This supplement seeks to build on the ongoing INSPIRE- K43 work by developing adapted mhGAP/IPT-G for online training platform as a response to COVID-19 and testing how effective online training is in comparison to face-to-face trainings.
