Mental Health Practitioners Take Part in Training

Mental health practitioners from the country’s four primary healthcare regions are taking part in a series of training workshops on mental health. The workshops take into consideration the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a greater need for the provision of mental health services. Deputy Director, Public Health & Wellness, Dr. Fidel Cuellar explained that the workshop is important because there is what is called a mental health gap.

Dr. Fidel Cuellar

Dr. Fidel Cuellar, Deputy Director, Public Health & Wellness

“You have a large population of people who has or will have a level of mental health disorder sometime in their life and what we’re seeing is that these are going undiagnosed and untreated. The purpose of this is to strengthen primary care, whereby the general physician or the nurse can identify these patients and can treat them effectively. That is the point of the training. This will happen in each one of the regions and it is a start of mental health care in the primary care setting. Where we’re lacking is that, we do have a few specialists; we have sixteen P.N.P.s, but they’re spread out all over the country and we need our general practitioners, we need our nurses to be equipped to see these people because they come to the clinic every single day but we just don’t see them, we don’t treat them because we don’t recognize them and this is the point of the training, to strengthen that area.”