COVID-19 and Community family mental health

For the Society for Pre and Post Natal Services (SPANS), the year 2020 was indeed a year of innovations, improvising, grabbing opportunities, implementing initiatives and creating milestones; all this done in the drive for the Organization to survive the global turbulence and make a mark both at Local and National level and upon the global Mental Health arena at large. The unfavorable economic climate, exacerbated by the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, made the year a time of learning valuable lessons on surviving in a demanding professional climate and managing to cultivate and establish visibility and relevance on an international scale.

Links:

• SPANS stories on the community

• Report (PDF)
  

It being about six to seven months since the declaration and nationnwide imposition of the National Covid-19 Lockdown recommended by the World Health Organisation internationally to help curb the spread of Covid-19 infection, because of the relaxation and variation of the Lockdown conditions, the Society for Pre and Post Natal Services (SPANS) has noted with great concern how most people seem to have adopted a relaxed and carefree attitude towards observing the prescribed preventative guidelines. Observations at most shopping centres and any public places within the urban residential locations go to show how many citizens now disregard the use of face masks, practising social distancing or even the use of hand sanitisers at shop entrances. Most citizens seem to only use face masks when visiting places where they are likely to meet Enforceent agents, like when going to shopping centres which are closely monitored by the police or when going to clinics or shops where they will not be attended without face masks , or when travelling to the Central Business District where they can’t board ZUPCO buses without face masks. People also seem to crowd inside shops, on bus queues or when mixing and mingling at drinking places with totally no regard for social distancing. All this creates a conducive breeding ground for the unfettered spread of Covid-19 infections, bringing to nought all the prior combative efforts and erasing all the gains made to date in the containment of the pandemic.

In view of all the aforesaid observations, SPANS, taking up the Inter-Ministerial Task Force’s call for behaviour change in the fight against the pandemic, undertook to take the call for total acceptance and adoption of the “new normal” as one of the key messages disseminated to the community during this Community Mental Health Awareness campaign.

• REPORT_ON_2nd_SPANS_COVID19_COMMUNITY_FAMILY_MENTAL_HEALTH_AWARENESS_RESPONSE.pdf (PDF)