IMHPA

Funded by the European Commission (DGSANCO), the Integrating mental health promotion interventions (IMHPA) project aimed to develop and disseminate evidence-based mental health promotion (MHP) and mental disorder prevention (MDP) interventions and to integrate them into practice, policy and health care professionals' daily clinical work.

Project aims

The IMHPA project created four development strands to achieve these aims:

  • The first strand aimed to develop and integrate MHP and MDP in the practice field and for this purpose a taskforce had been created to develop an Internet Database.
  • The second strand aimed to develop MHP and MDP in the primary health care field and for this purpose a taskforce had been created to develop a training manual for primary health care professionals.
  • The third strand aimed to develop policy guidelines at the European and national levels for MHP and MDP and for this purpose a policy taskforce had been created.
  • The fourth strand aimed to provide an overview of the MHP and MDP situation of available infrastructures, policies and programmes and for this purpose all partners were involved in the development of country coalitions and dissemination actions. 

 

The main goals were to test the efficacy of the Imhpa training manual for primary health care in changing General Practitioner’s (GP) behaviour, patients’ emotional symptomatology and eventually the prevention of depression and anxiety disorders. 

 

Whenever possible the study would aim to estimate the cost-effectiveness of training general practitioners on managing emotional symptoms.

 

Research team

Dr Nigel Sherriff

Caroline Hall

Output

Jane-Llopis et al., (2005) Integrating Mental Health Promotion interventions into countries policies, practice and mental health care system (the IMPHA project), Radboud University Nijmegen

Partners

Since its start in April 2003 Imhpa included 14 partners from European Member States with 14 country representatives that act as partners and country based team leaders. The following countries were included:

Austria

Belgium

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Ireland

Italy

Luxembourg

Netherlands

Portugal

Spain

Sweden

The United Kingdom (England).

In addition, Professor Dr M. Mittelmark acted as the country observer for Norway and its country-based team leader.