It Takes More than a Village: Leveraging Globalized Information, Knowledge, and Resources to Design Services Tailored to an Accountable Health Community for Mental Health

The design of service delivery models for mental healthcare and mental illness prevention through the deliberate integration of healthcare and public health organizations and providers with community-level service providers, who may not be generally thought of as healthcare providers, holds promise of sustainable improvement to mental healthcare access issues, to improvements in care quality, to needed modifications of policy, and to reduction in care costs. This chapter addresses the use of tools and strategies to support learning from globalized information, knowledge, and resources to lead to effective community-level solutions designed to improve the social, economic, environmental, and cultural determinants of health and to create the level and type of pan-community collaboration necessary to make these improvements. Attention to these improvements is critical for advancing healthcare equity, especially in disadvantaged communities or in situations where the economic or political situation leads to inequities in health status. This chapter demonstrates that strongly integrated, community-centric, models of mental healthcare delivery are possible, affordable, and preferable to the models in current use through discussion of the approaches that can be re-tailored by specific communities to meet their unique set of circumstances. This chapter illustrates the tools and strategies through pertinent examples from around the globe. The objective of this chapter is to describe how communities can cost-effectively employ specific tools and reinforcing strategies, including those needed for evaluation, to transform the delivery of mental services and improve the health of their population in ways that ensure parity through innovation and accountability.