Expanding Access to High Quality Mental Health Care in Rural Regions: Lessons from Implementing the Collaborative Care Model in Nepal

Global Health Seminar Series 2021-22

Thursday, October 14, 2021     |     12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Dr. Acharya is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at University of California San Francisco (UCSF). He conducts clinical care and research in low-resource settings and is the founding-director of the UCSF Psychiatry HEAL Fellowship in Global Mental Health. He is the co-founder of Possible, a non-profit organization that built and operated two healthcare systems that provided care for over 500,000 people in a public-private partnership with the Nepali Government.

Healthcare systems are often forced to choose only two out of three: 1) wide access to services, 2) low costs, and 3) high quality care. However, carefully designed health systems can achieve all three. Based on our experiences with implementing the Collaborative Care Model for mental health in rural Nepal, this presentation will discuss challenges and strategies in expanding access to high-quality mental health care in rural regions where specialists are rare.