Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support-Foundational Helping Skills

Overview

There is lack of feasible and effective curricula that can rapidly be taught on basic mental health and psychosocial helping skills. Through the World Health Organization Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support initiative, a curriculum has been developed focusing on common factors in mental health and psychosocial support, such as verbal and nonverbal communication skills, empathy, rapport building, and promoting hope and expectancy of change. To minimize training burden and maximize effectiveness, this has been designed as a competency-based training wherein target competencies are evaluated throughout the training so that it can tailored to trainees preexisting skills, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach to the training. The training duration and content is modular and flexible, with approximately 16 hours of modules content. The investigator's goal is to conduct a mixed-methods evaluation of the foundational helping skills program. In three countries, Nepal, Peru, and Uganda, two trainers (total n=6 across countries) and 36 service providers (total n=108 across countries) without prior training in mental health and psychosocial support skills will receive the training. Their competency in foundational helping skills will be evaluated prior to training using an objective structured clinical examination approach with standardized role plays using trained raters and actor (i.e., standardized clients). Role play ratings will be made using the ENhancing Assessment of Common Therapeutic factors. In addition, trainees knowledge and perceived self-efficacy in foundational helping skills will be evaluated pre- and post-training. Trainers and trainees will also participate in qualitative interviews regarding feasibility, acceptability, and perceived benefit of the foundational helping skills program. A mixed methods evaluation of the foundational helping skills curriculum will help to inform further revision of the materials on the Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support platform. Determination of the change in skills, knowledge, and self-efficacy will identify effective components of the platform and areas for further refinement. Ultimately, an effective training program in foundational helping skills will contribute to improved health, psychological, and social services around the world.

The World Health Organization Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support program is currently developing a Universal Foundational Helping Skills Training package. This training package will be freely available for use by all health professionals and other service providers seeking to develop basic skills in mental health and psychosocial support. These foundational helping skills are based upon common factors in the mental health and psychological services, which have been widely researched and identified as essential and universal prerequisites for the effective delivery of any psychosocial or psychological components in health interventions. These are also foundational skills are also part of the competencies for non-specialists to deliver psychological interventions in global mental health. Competent use of these skills by providers improves outcomes for people accessing all fields of health services--ranging from surgery to pain clinics--support greater treatment adherence. A foundational helping skills training curriculum is needed to promote competency in the provision of warm and trusting relationships between health care providers and people accessing health services. Other foundational helping skills include rapport building, the demonstration of empathy, using culturally or age-appropriate terminology and concepts for distress, and ensuring communication of hope. This training guidance will fill the gap many training programs for providers who are not mental health specialists, and the training guidance will be feasible for implementation in low-resource settings. The training will be aligned with the World Health Organization competency framework for the health sector that is under development, which stipulates foundational helping skills as essential for all health cadres. The World Health Organization Universal Foundational Helping Skills Training package has the potential to improve competency for basic mental health and psychosocial support services delivered by any health cadres. This training package, alongside other quality improvement activities, will lead to more effective delivery of quality care for clients and will be one step closer to achieving the global communities' and World Health Organization's goal of universal health care. The goal of this study is to conduct a mixed-methods evaluation of the Foundational Helping Skills curriculum by observing outcomes for trainees in the program who not have prior mental health and psychosocial support skills training.