The Need to Strengthen Primary Health Care Services to Improve Mental Health Care Services in South Africa

Despite the reported increase in the prevalence of mental disorders, including substance abuse disorders, required services in South Africa have not been improved to meet the demands for these challenges. Although South Africa has invested in a process to conduct a re-engineering of primary health care services to address a range of common health challenges in communities, this process has not demonstrated adequate policy and practice changes toaddress emerging challenges in providing services for mental health disorders at primary health care level. In particular, primary health care services do not include routine screening for common mental disorders, which include depression, anxiety, postnatal depression and substance abuse, although there are easy to use tools for such screening. This has resulted in a failure for early detection of these mental health challenges by the health system. The chapter argues that making moderate changes to the current offerings of primary health care can result in major achievements in offering mental health services, which in turn will benefit the patients and assist health services to address the increasing scourge of mental disorders, which include substance abuse.