Psychosocial Programme

The Regional Mental Hospital of Nagpur dates back to 1884 and is over a century old. It is a 940-bed hospital with an average occupancy of 600 patients. The hospital serves a catchment area of over 24 million people across 11 districts of Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region. It hosts a large number of persons with chronic mental illness who are homeless or have no active family linkages, and are in dire need of being treated and reintegrated into society. About 30% of the patients are ‘long-stay’ patients, with an average stay of about 25 years.

The Tata Trusts’ effort is to offer systemic and evidence-based reforms, repurposing the role of a psychiatric hospital to offer vulnerable people an important element of care that is otherwise not available in low-resource settings.

The Trusts work on addressing the critical needs of patients through the following interventions:

• Structural reform of the hospital, including acute wards, washrooms, drinking water facilities and salons.
• Capacity building of hospital staff including psychiatric training and training in IT.
• Employment pathway creation within the hospital for patients, such as farming, mobile cafeteria and laundry.

The Trusts have also deployed a Management Information System (MIS) to capture patient records that were hitherto maintained in manual registers, to ensure sustained monitoring of patient recovery.

Areas of Operation: Nagpur

The Tata Trusts have launched a district-wide community mental health programme that directly covers a population of five million people and provides mental health services at their doorstep. It aims to work with communities to build awareness on mental health, enable early detection of any mental illness, and provide comprehensive care closer to home.

The project covers 13 blocks in Nagpur district, and caters to a population of 5 million people. Door-to-door screenings are conducted by accredited social health activists (ASHAs) and other frontline workers, who identify suspected patients and create referral linkages for their diagnosis and treatment. The project also aims to reduce the stigma around mental illness and to promote awareness of mental health issues through community-led awareness events.

Areas of Operation: Nagpur

As part of the mental health initiatives in Maharashtra, in collaboration with the Government of Maharashtra, the Tata Trusts set up a Technical Support Unit (TSU). This unit is envisaged as a centrally-located mechanism within the state, and aims to strengthen Maharashtra’s mental health programme with its varied components. The goal is also to facilitate the scale of experience, learning and knowledge generated by the Trusts to implement programmes in mental health care in collaboration with the government. This is the first-ever such TSU within a government system.

The TSU’s primary goal is to support the government in the development of a vibrant and integrated mental health care programme, and to increase access and quality of care through the development of an active technical support team that can help to strengthen such programmes. The TSU also aims to train human resource cadres for mental health care across the state, using a master trainer-based cascade model.

The support unit will create an integrated mental health and information system along with a dashboard that provides information about state programmes and decision making, and support the annual PIP development process. It will also help in the development of a functional system for the implementation of the Mental Healthcare Act of 2018.

The Trusts have partnered with the Government of Maharashtra for two ongoing mental health care programmes in the state. One is the institutional reform of the Regional Mental Hospital, Nagpur, to develop it into a centre for excellence. The other is to implement the district mental health programme for Nagpur district, and scaling it to be a replicable model.

The Trusts’ TSU will thus develop, implement and handhold standard guidelines for all components of mental health care service delivery in the state.