On the 27th of September 2019, the highly anticipated MEGA “Training the Trainer” workshop was held in Cape Town. In the months leading up, we had worked hard to incorporate all the valuable feedback from primary health care workers and students from Zambia, South Africa and Germany who had taken part in the piloting phase. Read More
In an icy week in February, a dramatic and interesting meeting of the MEGA project took place in Turku, Finland. Events included: a pilot fainting, a broken shoulder, a twisted ankle, lost luggage, and project partners getting lost all over the city. Read More
The objective of the 3-year MEGA project is to develop and introduce an assessment tool to be used on a smartphone to help treat mental health problems of children and adolescents. The application will be designed to be user-friendly so that primary health care centres in rural areas benefit from it as well. The project will train individuals in the use of the application in universities, who in turn will train healthcare staff in South Africa and Zambia. The project also involves research activities, namely: a doctoral dissertation and Master student thesis. Read More
The MEGA project was born in Riga in the autumn of 2015 during the European Conference of Mental Health. Mari Lahti and Heikki Ellilä, Principal Lecturers at Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS) participated in the conference arrangements and met a colleague from South Africa, Ronelle Jansen. Together they started to consider different opportunities for future project collaboration. Ronelle’s words, “even the poorest of the poor have a smartphone in Africa” stayed in their mind. In fact, these were the words that created the project. Read More