Research Programme for Improving Mental Health Care

PRIME is an international research consortium, working in 5 low and middle-income countries: Ethiopia, India, Nepal, South Africa and Uganda. The purpose of PRIME is to develop, implement and evaluate models of primary mental health care in low resource settings over a 6 year period. In its evaluations PRIME will assess the impact of packages of care on mental health, social functioning and poverty. They will use the lessons generated to scale up these interventions in programme countries, and provide policy recommendations to other low and middle-income countries.

PRIME's goal is to generate new knowledge to inform policy and practice aimed at improving mental health care through routine health care delivery systems in low resource settings. The ultimate purpose is to generate benefits for mental health, physical health and socio-economic outcomes. It will achieve these broad goals by addressing three major objectives in three phases across the programme.

1. Development of feasible and acceptable packages of care for mental disorders within routine primary care in low resource settings (the Inception phase).
2. Evaluating the effectiveness of components and packages of care for mental disorders in routine health care contexts (the Implementation phase).
3. Scaling up and evaluating an integrated comprehensive mental health care plan at the level of administrative health units (the Scaling Up phase).

Partners in the consortium include Makerere University (Uganda), Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), Sangath (India), Centre for Global Mental Health (UK) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Collaborators in the consortium include Ministry of Health (Ethiopia), Madhya Pradesh State Ministry of Health (India), Ministry of Health (Nepal), Department of Health (South Africa), Ministry of Health (Uganda), BasicNeeds, Health Net TPO (Nepal) and Public Health Foundation of India.