Support for innovative psychiatric care

Professional development across 12 time zones!

Continuing many years’ collaboration with Sajida Foundation health programs, BHP volunteers have recently been supporting development of The Neuroscience & Psychiatry Hub, a modern psychiatric hospital in Dhaka. Since late 2024, BHP Director Alex Berland and Canadians Ann Greene and Tom Grauman have provided training on patient-centred mental health care for the hospital’s nurses and physicians. Ann has led live, twice-weekly case reviews on-line, guiding staff through patient assessment and care planning. Tom recently returned from a six-week site visit where he coached staff in therapeutic communication and non-violent crisis intervention and also developed job descriptions and care protocols.

At the first ever Hearing Voices workshop in Bangladesh

While in Dhaka during May, Tom also provided a workshop based on the “Hearing Voices” curriculum, which helps care providers understand the challenges encountered by individuals experiencing auditory hallucinations. One of the psychiatrists attending said afterwards, “We deal with a lot of patients who hear voices. But this training has made me truly appreciate their experience and also empathize with their difficulties in their day to day.” Another participant stated, “This was a profound reminder of the power of listening without judgment. It challenged clinical conventions and opened our eyes to the value of lived experience in shaping compassionate, person-centred mental health care.”

Educating the future workforce

IUBAT nursing students with visiting faculty volunteers

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Nicholas Eberstadt writes, “In the foreseeable future, many poorer countries will have to contend with the needs of an aged society even though their workers are far less productive than those in wealthier countries. Consider Bangladesh: a poor country today that will be an elderly society tomorrow, with over 13 percent of its 2050 population projected to be seniors. The backbone of the Bangladeshi labor force in 2050 will be today’s youth. But standardized tests show that five in six members of this group fail to meet even the very lowest international skill standards deemed necessary for participation in a modern economy: the overwhelming majority of this rising cohort cannot ‘read and answer basic questions’ or ‘add, subtract, and round whole numbers and decimals.’”

We have written frequently about BHP efforts to tackle this problem, including our delivery of free pre-school and primary education in a rural village; advocacy for meaningful, national-level student assessments, and BHP Director John Richards’ book on education in South Asia. As a tiny organization, however, BHP has only limited impact. We are hopeful that the education reform group now making recommendations to the interim government in Bangladesh will be able to achieve more substantial change.

Caring about the “care economy”

Sajida HCW training - "What does it feel like to be fed by someone else?"

“Care is what makes all other jobs possible, as it encompasses relationships, services and both paid and unpaid work that make lives possible,” according to a recent report by the World Economic Forum. “Individual employees can work because children, older adults and their loved ones in need of care are being cared for. If this care work did not take place, it would be virtually impossible to be employed outside the home. Not only is care indispensable for the rest of the economy to work, care work in and of itself is an untapped source of employment which is growing. Investing in care creates jobs.”

A major focus of BHP activities is education of health care workers [HCW] in Bangladesh. HCW shortage is a problem locally and globally, but an even greater problem is the shortage of educators. From our initial work to help develop the College of Nursing at IUBAT, we now focus on training of trainers. This includes developing open education resources in collaboration with Nurses International, training trainers of care aides for the elder care program at Sajida Foundation, supporting IUBAT alumni for higher education, developing a Master of Public Health program at IUBAT as a career pathway for HCW, and most recently, recruiting volunteer trainers for Sajida Foundation mental health programs.