EMPOWER – Building the World's Mental Health Workforce

Depression is the leading mental health cause of the global burden of disease and global estimated costs of untreated depression are up to US $16 trillion. Psychological treatments, including those delivered by non-specialist providers (NSPs), are among the most effective interventions in medicine but remain inaccessible for the majority of the world’s population. Supervision is essential to ensure high-quality psychological treatments and is particularly relevant for those delivered by NSPs. However, the reliance on mental health specialists to supervise the NSP is not scalable because they are not readily available and existing in-person methods are expensive, time-intensive and lack generalizable metrics. This is especially true in low- and middle-income countries such as India where there are few mental health specialists who have been adequately trained in psychological treatments and who are available to provide supervision. In addition, existing NSPs face enormous competing pressures on their time related to other health care tasks to attend in-person supervision. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic places further restriction on non-essential in-person activities. In sum, a lack of scalable and quantifiable methods of supervision in real-world settings is a major barrier to the sustaining the quality of the delivery of psychological treatments.