Mental Health

Our goal is to engage households affected or at an eminent risk of being affected with Mental Illness in therapies available at Bwindi Community.

Bwindi Community Hospital is running a community based mental health program that has supported more than 3700 people with Psychosocial Challenges since 2013. The program has a well-established community structure with a committee in each of the 17 parishes in our immediate catchment area which consists of 2 users of the service-male and female, 1 attendant of a user of the service, 1 community health volunteer and 1 local leader. The function of the committee is to run the activities of peer support groups that are formed based on the clinical conditions but currently they are still run as general mental health support groups.

Clinical work both in the hospital and community is supported by general health workers that received WHO’s Mental Health GAP Training where at least 2 staff from each department and 1 staff from a health unit, respectively, were taken through this training. The service is integrated in the already existing services both in the hospital and community. BCH pioneered training of health workers from lower health facilities in its immediate catchment area with mental health training to equip them to provide mental health services to the local population. A total of 114 health workers have been trained.

Twenty seven (27) outreaches are conducted every month to reach out to each of the meeting points in the parishes. As part of rehabilitation for the patients we so far established 86 livelihood projects in the 17 parishes in our immediate catchment area. The outreaches include 10 villages for the Batwa

We are looking forward to strengthening our current interventions and also differentiating patients’ peer support groups- the main ones being in areas of General Mental Health, Epilepsy, Alcoholics Anonymous, Depression, Gender-based Violence and Families with children having Cerebral Palsy