JULY 2 2015
As regular readers of Gede's blogs will know, the Foundation is working with a number of agencies to assess ways in which the mental health 'treatment gap' (essentially the significant difference in the number of people with mental health conditions and the expertise available (often limited in number) to screen, treat and/or refer) can be addressed. At the time of writing, 'conventional wisdom' tends to adopt an approach which is based on expanding the availability of 'in country' expertise through, for example, task shifting/sharing within non specialist health workers. While both understandable and often realistic, this approach tends to ignore the role in which mental health expertise located within the Nigerian diaspora could potentially play. On Thursday July 2, Gede's Managing Director, Mr John Minto, met with the CEO and Founder of Medicine Africa (wwwmedicineafrica.com), Dr Alexander Finlayson, one of the world's leading NGOs focused on using information and communications technology to address a number of health related skills gap. Gede and Medicine Africa have agreed to work together to identify a number of initiatives which would test the idea that modern telecommunications can be used to address the mental health treatment gap within Nigeria through the additional engagement of the significant number of mental health professionals within the Nigerian diaspora, initially within the UK and EU.