Quality of Care, Mental Health Consultant

Background

Recognizing that quality of care is an integral part of the implementation of humanitarian health programs, in 2019 the Global Health Cluster established a Quality Improvement Task Team (QITT) to provide guidance to its implementing members. The QITT then developed a collection of tools and resources to measure the quality of care for various health services and supporting functions of healthcare henceforth referred to as the Toolkit. While many tools and resources were collected, a remaining gap is a tool that be readily used to assess and improve the quality of care for Mental Health in humanitarian settings.

Scope of Work

In A Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework for Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings the IASC Reference Group defines several objectives and indicators to achieve quality MHPSS programming. Among these is Outcome 5: People with mental health and psychosocial problems use appropriate focused care Indicator O5.5: Number of women, men, girls and boys who receive clinical management of mental, neurological or substance use disorders through

medical services (primary, secondary or tertiary health care). While clinical care of MH is a critical component of health services in humanitarian settings, the QITT was not able to identify and appropriate tool to measure the quality of this care for inclusion in the Toolkit.

For this consultancy, the FHI 360 Crisis Response Team requires the services of a Mental Health in Emergencies specialist that can identify and adapt a tool or tools for inclusion in the Toolkit that can be used by partners implementing mental health services in humanitarian settings to assess quality of care and make improvements based on subsequent data.

The tool will be developed in coordination and collaboration with QITT members, pulling from their organizational and individual experience and expertise in Mental Health and implementation of healthcare in humanitarian settings. The Global Health Cluster and Country Health Clusters will be closely engaged to provide direction and context for the development of the MH tool as the end-product should be readily usable and acceptable by Health Cluster partners. The MH tool must measure the quality of care given and received by users of MH services and not focused on program or activity quality and be usable by implementing partners that may not have extensive programmatic support in analysis and interpretation of the tool.

Specific Tasks and Responsibilities:

· With the QITT, identify what type of clinical MH services require measures of quality of care – services may be delivered by specialized or non-specialized service provides such as mhGAP.

· Identify existing tools that measure quality of Mental Health care – ideally from humanitarian settings but may also come from development or stable settings.

· Adapt tools for use in humanitarian settings.

Deliverables:

· Summary table and report of available MH quality of care tools currently available

· Finalized, adapted tool for MH quality of care for humanitarian settings **

Location of Work

Remote

Travel

None required

Qualifications

• Master’s degree or its International Equivalent or terminal degree in Psychology, Medicine, Public Health or related technical field
• At least 5 years of professional experience Humanitarian Mental Health and a recognized subject matter specialist
• Experience implementing, adapting, and designing tools to measure the quality of care

• Experience engaging with multiple stakeholders in resource development

• Sensitivity to considerations of Gender, Equity, and Social Inclusion (GESI) regarding mental health care

Evaluation Criteria

Proposals will be evaluated in accordance with the following criteria:

• Expertise in Mental Health, specifically in quality-of-care measures in humanitarian settings
• Knowledge of humanitarian health actors initiatives and implementation
• Consultancy experience with similar organizations

FHI 360 Disclaimers

· FHI 360 may perform a background check on any selected Consultant candidates.

· FHI 360 may cancel the solicitation and not award

· FHI 360 may reject any or all responses received

· Issuance of the solicitation does not constitute an award commitment by FHI 360

· FHI 360 reserves the right to disqualify any offer based on failure of the offeror to follow solicitation instructions

· FHI 360 will not compensate any offeror for responding to solicitation

· FHI 360 reserves the right to issue award based on initial evaluation of offers without further discussion

· FHI 360 may choose to award only part of the activities in the solicitation, or issue multiple awards based on the solicitation activities

· FHI 360 reserves the right to waive minor proposal deficiencies that can be corrected prior to award determination to promote competition**

· FHI 360’s supplier terms and conditions can be found here while our consultant terms and conditions can be found here