Prestigious medical journal - The Lancet - features SystemSeed project
Elise West, Evgeniy Maslovskiy and Andrey Yurtaev receive co-author credits for their work on the World Health Organization's EQUIP project
Three of the SystemSeed team, Elise West (CPO), Evgeniy Maslovskiy (CTO), and Andrey Yurtaev (Technical Lead), have been named as authors in the prestigious Lancet Psychiatry journal.
The article is titled 'Competency-based training and supervision: development of the WHO-UNICEF Ensuring Quality in Psychosocial and Mental Health Care (EQUIP) initiative', and details the impact to date of the EQUIP project.
EQUIP is a WHO and UNICEF-backed programme to deliver mental health support in low-and-middle-income countries. Digitising the EQUIP methodology (originally developed by Brandon Koch of George Washington University and his colleagues), meant taking an in-person, and paper-based approach and creating an online platform that assessors could use to rate the competencies of the 'helpers' who provide mental health support.
From its public launch in March, 2022, through to March, 2024, EQUIP's digital platform has been used in 794 training programmes in 36 countries with 3760 trainees resulting in 10 001 competency assessments.
How EQUIP came about
Globally, there has not been a standardised approach to ensure that the growing number of people who are not licensed clinicians but are delivering psychological interventions and mental health services have the competencies to deliver those interventions and services safely. Therefore, WHO and UNICEF developed Ensuring Quality in Psychosocial and Mental Health Care (EQUIP).
EQUIP is a free resource with a digital platform that can be used to guide competency assessment. We describe EQUIP's 5-year development (2018–23) and the rationale supporting its contents and use. Development phases included establishing consensus for competency-based strategies; selecting foundational competencies; evaluating feasibility of assessments, role plays, and technology; piloting EQUIP when training non-specialists; and public dissemination and ongoing adaptations to increase scalability.
We're all proud of our role in the success of the EQUIP project, and it's an honour to be credited in such an established medical journal as The Lancet.
SystemSeed's role
Originally, Elise was brought into the EQUIP project team by WHO to research user needs, in partnership with 7 research organisations in Peru, Jordan, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Uganda, Nepal and Kenya. This was followed by UX workshops with all partnering stakeholders. She also led on the creation of technical requirements for the new platform.
Evgeniy and Andrey led the technical delivery of these requirements and, together with Elise, found product-led answers to problems such as lack of parity in assessments, provision of multilingual formats (including right-to-left languages such as Arabic), and allowing offline use in low-connectivity areas.
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