To celebrate 10 years of the Gulu-Sheffield Mental Health Partnership, Kim Parker (Clinical Lead for the partnership) has written a blog about the achievements of the partnership since its launch.
In June 2012 the Trust's then Chief Nurse met with the Gulu Hospital Director and the Patient Safety Partnership was born. During that time some incredible work has been done. These are our best bits.
A team of Respect instructors were trained in Gulu and 400 hospital staff have received Level 3 Respect training plus many staff on annual updates.
Over 800 staff have been trained in suicide awareness and prevention, which includes training trainers who then trained health staff, community leaders, journalists and senior people with political influence. This training was made possible thanks to two grants from the Tropical Health Education Trust (THET) and the Burdett Trust for Nursing and enabled us to provide support to Gulu with the pandemic. Almost 400 clinical staff from hospital and health centres and Village Heaths Teams have been trained in psychosocial support of people with COVID-19.
There have been other types of training provided too, including mental health awareness and Epilepsy awareness, with over 1,800 staff and people in the community now having been trained in total.
With donations and fundraising we have built a community centre in a remote rural village, created and opened a ward for children in the mental health unit, installed rain harvesters, opened a borehole and provided physical health monitoring equipment to the mental health ward and the wider hospital, plus much much more.
