admin
Mukudzei Chingwere in ROME, Italy
Zimbabwe appreciates that it has mental health challenges just as is the case with all other countries and is taking corrective measures to cater for the needs of all affected citizens, Deputy Minister of Health and Child Care Dr John Mangwiro has said.
Deputy Minister Mangwiro said this on arrival here where he is leading the Zimbabwe delegation’s participation at the fourth edition of the Global Mental Health Summit (GMHS).
At the centre of its response to the scourge, Zimbabwe has capacity building and the need to build a knowledgeable workforce at the forefront.
Deputy Minister Mangwiro said his delegation will take advantage of its participation at the GMHS to benchmark and peer review its strategy with the rest of the world.
“We recognise that there are mental health challenges in the country and the way to go about it is making sure we are able to cater for their needs.
“We are doing capacity building, by capacity building we mean they are trained mental health workers, but we also have people who work with people with these mental health problems who are not trained.
“So, we are having them trained from all institutions, cadres who are not mental health workers are trained and are integrated and taught how to deal with mental health conditions,” said Dr Mangwiro.
He said this training to capacitate health workers is being done right from the chief director level personnel down through to community health workers.
This is a means of ensuring every professional can effectively handle mental health problems if they encounter them.
“We need a knowledgeable workforce,” said Dr Mangwiro.
He said they are also targeting those who have had mental challenges themselves to capacitate them as a way of integrating them to lead respectable lives without discrimination from the community.
President Mnangagwa has also set up an inter-ministerial task force as a means of ensuring a whole societal approach to dealing with mental health challenges.
“As Government, the President set up an inter-ministerial task force where we are looking at all facets to make sure that we look at the supply chain and we also look at this by training the youths themselves to make sure they are occupied,” said Dr Mnagwiro.
“We need them to be rehabilitated in society. When we come here to Rome we are going to be learning from others.
“We will also hear what others are doing in their different countries, hospitals and communities. So, this whole thing is going to be a community changer, societal change will be there,” said Dr Mangwiro.
“We will also give them our experiences and practices such that there will be cross-pollination of ideas in a manner that will allow us to be able to come up with a much-improved approach to mental health issues.
“The idea being that people living with mental health issues or with lived experiences are treated better, are handled better, their rights are respected and they are allowed to be able to look at themselves,” said Dr Mangwiro.
This edition of the GMHS seeks to tap into Italy’s global pace setting in the areas of community mental health and will also seek to strengthen earlier editions of the summit which were held in London, Amsterdam and Paris.
Online Reporter