Mental and General Health Assessment in partnership with Mitra Solutions

Mental and General Health Assessment

As COVID-19 has made a negative impact on the physical health of communities, it is equally important to address the psychosocial impact it has made on individuals. Sarvodaya with the help of Mitra Solutions will continue to work on a digital model to assess the current general health of communities and to address matters of their overall wellbeing. Two surveys will be utilised to study the psychosocial health of the Sri Lankan communities namely: WHO QOL – World Health Organization - Quality of Life of the individual and the GHQ- General Health Questionnaire of the individual. These questionnaires will be modified in the long run to cater specific health needs.

Since the mental illness spectrum is a continuum organic mental illness are more complex to resolve. Anxiety, depression, and stress are much more defined in care plans and does not necessarily require clinical intervention. The idea behind these questionnaires were to localize it to the Sri Lankan culture – multilingual approach and to focus on the culturally appropriate methods of healing.

The project targets to collect 2000 questionnaires to form a national sample to identify the general health of the population which includes the physical and mental health of the individuals.

Due to COVID-19 no physical data collection was carried out, instead a link was shared to be completed within communities, either through platforms such as WhatsApp or through email.

The data is currently being analysed by Mitra Solutions and will be evaluated by a panel of expert level Community Physicians. The panel consists of Dr. Vinya Ariyaratne, Dr. Kumarapeli and Dr. Gadampanathan. The team will be expanding the surveys to Colombo and will share the surveys through the flyers shown below.