International Mental Health Policy and Health Economics (Last Updated On: ) International Mental Health Policy and Health Economics In 1998 WFMH initiated a project to place a mental health specialist at the World Bank to provide assistance in international health planning. Professor Harvey Whiteford of the University of Queensland, Australia, who held the mental health specialist post in 1999, is now a WFMH Board member and has recently provided information about current initiatives in health economics at the Bank, WHO, among governments, and in academic circles. This field is attracting high-level attention to the role of mental disorders in the global burden of disease, to the economic consequences for individual countries, and to methods of financing mental health care in overall national health planning. Dr. Whiteford now chairs the International Consortium on Mental Health Policy and Services, which is funded by the Global Forum for Health Research and the governments of Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.A. The consortium is working to help governments and the World Bank to implement sustainable mental health reform. In October it gave a progress report to the International Conference on Health Research for Development hosted by the Global Forum, WHO and the World Bank in Bangkok. Further plans call for meetings to be held in all six WHO regions in the next six months. (The Consortium’s web-site, at www.world-mental-health.net, contains relevant documents.) Professor Whiteford and Florence Baingana, M.D., who holds the mental health specialist post at the Bank this year, are involved in an initiative there to study the way mental health services should be funded. This work is supported by the US National Institute for Mental Health. The aim is to develop a more sophisticated framework for examining the subject within the context of broader health sector reform and financing. In July Drs. Whiteford and Baingana met with WHO representatives in Geneva to discuss a joint WHO-World Bank approach to mental health financing. A follow-up meeting with WHO representatives will be held in Geneva in December. In November the World Bank and the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health are sponsoring a meeting of key developmental and health economists at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. The conference has been convened by Professor Whiteford and will be hosted by Professors Dean Jamison and Duncan Thomas of the Program on International Health, Education and Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles. The meeting will address the need to better understand the economic burden of mental illness for countries, and to develop frameworks to deliver cost-effective interventions (programs which not only reduce disability but also promote human development and economic productivity). The agenda will cover: Identification of cost-effective interventions. Mental health care funding. -overview of methods of purchasing -use of programmatic funding – use of insurance – public provision – user fees Implications for mental health care provision. – types of mental health care provision (for example, institutions or community care; specialized or primary care) – how to pay providers (for example, contracting or budgeting). Identifying the development and economic outcomes of investing in mental health services and reducing the burden of mental disorders.