Reducing Stigma Among Healthcare Providers to Improve Mental Health Services

A growing number of trials have demonstrated treatment effectiveness for people with mental illness (PWMI) by non-specialist providers, such as primary care and community health workers, in low-resource settings. A barrier to scaling up these evidence-based practices is the limited uptake from trainings into service provision and lack of fidelity to evidence-based practices among non-specialists. This arises, in part, from stigma among non-specialists against PWMI. Therefore, interventions are needed to address attitudes among non-specialists. To address this gap, REducing Stigma among HeAlthcare Providers to improvE Mental Health services (RESHAPE-mh), is an intervention for non-specialists in which social contact with PWMI is added to training and supervision programs. A pilot cluster randomized control trial will address primary objectives including trainees\' perspectives on perceived acceptability of PWMI\'s participation in training and supervision, intervention fidelity and contagion, assessment of randomization, and feasibility and psychometric properties of outcome measures in a cluster design. Secondary objectives are change in provider and patient outcomes. The control condition is existing mental health training and supervision for non-specialists delivered through the Programme for Improving Mental Healthcare (PRIME), which includes the mental health Global Action Programme (mhGAP) and psychosocial treatments. The intervention condition will incorporate social contact with PWMI into existing PRIME training and supervision. Participants in the pilot will be the direct beneficiaries of training and supervision (i.e., primary care workers) and indirect beneficiaries (i.e., their patients). Primary care workers\' outcomes include knowledge (mhGAP knowledge scale), explicit attitudes (mhGAP attitudes and social distance scales), implicit attitudes (Implicit Association Test), and clinical competence (Enhancing Assessment of Common Therapeutic factors, ENACT) to be assessed pre-training, post-training, and at 4-month follow-up. Patient outcomes include functioning, stigma experiences in accessing care, and depression/alcohol use symptoms to be assessed at initiation of mental health care and 6 months later. The pilot study will assist in modifying the intervention to inform a larger effectiveness trial of RESHAPE to ultimately improve provider attitudes and clinical competence as a mechanism to improve patient outcomes.