Community-oriented collaboration for mental health care and mental health promotion.

Abstract

partnership between schools and clusters of general practices, how music and the arts can contribute to healing and building communities. We will highlight the social and occupational impacts on mental health at all stages of life – parents, schools, workplace, retirement, the third age, end of life. We will argue that primary care does not have to do all of this, but that it is key to orchestrating it. Together we need to define a curriculum of skills and systematic ways for health care practitioners and managers to learn how to do this in sustainable, enjoyable ways. The central role of primary care in integrating mental health care and mental health promotion was noted over a decade ago by the much-missed Helen Lester, in a British Journal of General Practice paper titled ‘Integrated primary mental health care: threat or opportunity in the new NHS?’.[1] She and her co-authors explained that: