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.”

News from OfP

Bluebell School is experiencing growing pains. Total student enrolment is now 109 with 16 new students joining last year. As the student numbers increase, the teachers have recommended changes to make the building more functional. One extra-large room has now been divided into two classrooms. The outdoor toilet was also recently rebuilt at the request of the teachers. It had previously been repaired several times but with increased demand needed a new design. 

Outdoor toilet under construction at Bluebell School

Textbook distribution is always an exciting event at Bluebell School. Books are published and freely supplied by the government through the Upazila Education Office. As a registered school, Bluebell makes the necessary arrangements to secure enough books for all the students. BHP pays for many other books and learning materials supplied to students by OfP.

Students from OfP Institute of Science and Technology participated in area-wide sports programs, competing against students from other post-secondary institutes. The OIST team did well all the way to the semi-finals but did not win in the final round of competition.

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.