NAN-HG-13
Integration
By Esenvosa Izah
Lagos, Jan. 5, 2016 (NAN) A Consultant Psychiatrist, Dr Oladapo Adegbaju, has advocated the integration of community mental health and Primary Health Care (PHC).
Adegbaju, the Head, Community Mental Health, Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos, told News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Lagos that the merger would reduce pressure on tertiary health institutions.
According to him, community mental health has been relegated to the background aside from stigmatisation.
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“Community mental health is supposed to be the ninth component of the primary healthcare services, but it has been relegated to the background; maybe because of funding.
“But, in community mental psychiatry now, we are taking it to make sure it is also included, whereby patients who are seen at the primary health centres are being screened.
“So that anybody who has the potential of developing a mental illness is actually screened.
“And the illness is nipped in the bud instead of progressing so much to the extent that it now gets to the referral centres, centres like Federal Neuro- Psychiatric Hospitals, Yaba.
“It will also be a form of trying to now de-stigmatise psychiatry itself; by the time you are seeing such cases at those primary health centres, the stigmatisation will be reducing gradually. “
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He said: “Tertiary Health Centres should see lesser patients, so that such centres can concentrate on research and other ways to improve mental health.
“Patients, who already have mental health challenges, instead of going to the tertiary centres, can get their medications from the PHCs.
“This will reduce crowd at the tertiary centres, so that those centres will concentrate more on doing research and know what can be done to improve mental health services.
“What is being practised currently is that every mental case is referred to the tertiary centres, and so, there is so much work and researches are not being carried out.“
Adegbaju stressed the need to train more health personnel including nurses, who represented a greater percentage at PHCs, on how to identify mental illnesses in patients.
He suggested a kind of collaboration between the tertiary institutions and PHCs where consultants go to the PHCs to assist periodically.
“Nurses who are at a larger percentage can be trained at least, to be able to detect some of these common mental illnesses like depression, schizophrenia and drug abuse.
“Once the nurses recognise any illness, they can actually refer the patients to the tertiary hospitals,“ he said. (NAN)
EEI/GOK/OSA/YEE
Edited by Olagoke Olatoye/Shittu Obassa/Emmanuel Yashim
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