Description
Hungarian mental health indicators are poor which contributes to the illness intrusiveness of the total population. Success in promoting mental health and wellbeing can only be achieved and sustained by the involvement of the whole community and the development of partnerships between a range of agencies in the public, private, and nongovernment sectors. The project has two main objectives: 1) To lay the foundation of methodological input to the national strategy development in the field of mental health promotion, including the operation of a Project Methodological Support Centre (MC) in order to upgrade 6 existing Health Promotion Offices (HPO) with Mental Health Promotion Centre functions (MHC) as a pilot. 2) To implement the conversion of 6 pre-existing HPOs into HPO-MHCs. HPOs are planned to serve as the start-off bases for future Mental Health Promotion Centres (MHCs). The mission is to assess, evaluate, store, and develop up-to date information regarding mental health promotion, prevention, care and rehabilitation related services, especially in the pilot micro regions. In addition, to aid networking regarding all mental health related services and activities in the micro region. Also intends to set up a national mental health knowledge center to provide access to national and international evidence based good practices. An analysis will be carried out in the HPO/MHCs to improve further development. A specialised expert groups will provide professional recommendations as an input to mental health in all policies. Primary target groups are the 6 HPOs. Secondary target groups: health care and other providers of the given micro-region, special risk groups at the local level and the general population of the micro-region. The purpose is to formulate recommendations for the implementation of the National Strategy for Mental Health Promotion under construction and to provide methodological background input to establishing a national network of HPO/MHCs.
Summary of project results
Mental health is gradually gaining more attention at policy level in Hungary, with promotion appearing in a growing number policy instruments. The project itself was a methodological pilot in nature, which was to look into possible ways of promoting mental health in the very proximity of end-users. Hence, it focused on collection of local good practices of mental health promotion as a practical ground in order to constitute a base for policy recommendations to superimpose. To that end the project promoter set up a methodological centre to elaborate guidelines for the definition of best practices to be collected, selected six settlements in various regions of Hungary for the establishment of local mental health centres to reach out to all relevant stakeholders to be involved, analysed international trends and elaborated an in-house scoring system to validate locally collected good practices for their incorporation in an aggregate policy recommendation paper. The latter document was well received by the Ministry of Human Capacities working on the National Mental Health Promotion Strategy (named after Prof. Maria Kopp officially) soon to be tabled before the cabinet. Its findings and specific recommendations have been found worthy to be included in the Strategy paper, and to be implemented through it. The deliverables of the project are to be capitalised on in two other ongoing projects under the relevant development operative programme, an EU-funded national instrument, both aiming at the improvement of mental health services network in Hungary, and overall access to mental care. The project promoter felt the need to deliver something directly to the general public, or to potential public end-users, therefore decided to review the pre-set deliverables and asked for the amendment to the contract, adding to more outputs to be delivered. These are the 1) extension of the mobile application health planner with mental health content, available free of charge in both google play and iOS app store, and the 2) creation of an online/offline knowledge base, a web-browser based platform containing all analyses, studies, policy recommendations, collection of local good practices.
Summary of bilateral results