Mental Health Support Group: A model to create Mental Health Workforce for Health Care

The COVID pandemic led to an increase in psychological issues. These issues were even more prominent among the Health Care Workers (HCWs) as they had significant risk factors such as long working hours, direct exposure to infection, isolation and quarantine, seeing loss around them, fear of carrying the virus home etc. It is important to address their psychological issues. The already existing mental health resources are limited in terms of numbers as well as accessibility. This led to a need to create a mental health workforce at the local level for the HCWs. We present the inception, training and service delivery of such a model from a medical college as a model to involve various disciplines and categories of staff to create a workforce. This can serve as a feasible model across different settings and for different target populations. The symposium will be presented in the following heads- 1.Background and Inception- Dr Dinesh Kataria; 2.Training of workforce- Dr Prerna Kukreti; 3.Service Delivery- Dr Bhavuk Garg.