Since 2019, the Mexican Health Secretariat, in collaboration with the Pan American Health Organization, UNAM’s Faculty of Psychology and the Psychiatric Care Services, have been working on the implementation of WHO Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) with the aim of strengthening the first level of care and offering greater mental health coverage to the population. To this end, a Central Team was formed to coordinate the process. Team members are pictured here during their first meeting at PAHO's local office, in 2019.
In a first planning phase, they carried out a mapping of services, a situational analysis of mental health units in Mexico, a review of medication delivery mechanisms, an adaptation of the mhGAP Intervention Guide and the standardization of training materials.
Two relevant elements to consider regarding the mhGAP implementation in Mexico are the effort and knowledge invested in the adaptation and homologation of the training materials, creating a team of experts together with the central team, who will also accompany and advise new teams as they are trained. After an initial piloting of these adapted materials in the states of Guerrero, Coahuila, Michoacán and Chiapas, the Ministry of Health began a national training process, with 5,876 first-level health care personnel from all the states of the federation trained to date.
The goal is to train all primary care health workers by the year 2024, thus making mental health services accessible to the entire Mexican population.
