Support to Gaza Community Mental Health Prog 15/18

GCMHP has made extensive changes and shown significant progress in its organizational development, service delivery, and research development since the beginning of the contribution in 2015.  Throughout the activity period, the main results achieved by GCMHP are:  - GCMHP's services have reached 90,224 direct beneficiaries with estimated dozens of thousands of indirect beneficiaries from community interventions, awareness raising activities, rehabilitation and therapeutic services. All reported figures are disaggregated by sex and age; - The capacity building activities targeted social workers, case managers, counselors, teachers, law enforcement personnel, students, and caregivers who work with local and international NGOs and UN agencies;  - The free telephone counseling has attracted thousands of beneficiaries. The percentage of men who have resorted to telephone counseling has increased from 31% of callers in 2015 to 47% of callers in 2018- which shows that more men became aware of the service and saw the benefits of using it; -  GCMHP implemented two emergency response interventions in 2014 and 2018 by mobilizing mental health workers and satellite teams to provide psychological first aid. GCMHP integrated the lessons learned from 2014 in its response in 2018 to provide wider coverage and activate a more efficient referral mechanism;  - The development of a Research Strategy in collaboration with three international universities, and the publishing of numerous articles in scientific journals about mental health and human rights in Gaza; - Another achievement is the introduction of 'autism' as a field in the Palestinian mental health care system; - An international conference entitled 'Mental Health and Human Rights in Palestine' organized by GCMHP was attended by more than 800 professionals, whereby thirty-six papers were presented;  - A major result during the implementation period was the organizational restructuring that resulted in the following new policies: Security Policy, Gender Mainstreaming Policy, Child Safety Policy, and the management information system and quality assurance practices;  - One of the unexpected results was GCMHP being awarded the 'Excellence and Creativity in Achievement' award by the Welfare association. 

The overall objective of the intervention is to provide high quality, integrated and specialised mental health services and to enhance and sustain the Palestinian Society's wellbeing, based on the principles of justice, humanity and respect for human rights.