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This session was moderated by Gary S Belkin, Associate Professor and Director, Program in Global Mental Health, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA.

Scaling up of proven treatments for mental conditions, is a core, founding, goal of the Movement for Global Mental Health. But scale-up involves more than mere dissemination or distribution of discrete treatments. It involves a range of considerations and capabilities including defining and prioritizing targets, clarifying key outcomes, establishing consensus over training and supervision routines, developing continuous quality management practices, creating associated policies, other-sector alliances and capacities, etc. Translating a growing body of work on effective treatment strategies in less resourced settings, into continuously improving opportunities for access to such treatments, is a key goal for our Movement, but will need more carefully planned systems approaches and management practices to succeed. This session sought to identify such issues and challenges in the scale-up of mental health treatments.

Dr Bhutta was selected as the session keynote speaker given his work in an area outside of mental health—maternal child health—which has seen comparably greater global mobilization of research work, resources, advocacy, and implementation success in terms of scaling up and disseminating interventions. It was thus hoped to glean “lessons-learned” from this field and its decades of evolution so as to help identify tasks for success in our own work.

MCH made advances based in part on robust and precise data as to the key risk periods and points in illness trajectory to target intervention individually and geographically

Attention paid to defining variables that impact how, if, and when, individuals seek and use care or services.

An evidence-base of “what works” is only a beginning- cataloguing effective treatments is only a starting point to identifying implementation and targeting criteria and features that go into narrowing down and selecting a program of interventions around which to focus policy in a given area or purpose. Doing so needs more than RCT and classic effectiveness trial research, but also work in cost-benefit studies and systems/context of implementation studies and assessment.

Health workers or “extenders” are a key part of a scale-up strategy and their minimum skill ensemble and ways of interfacing with other providers and at what points in illness course are clearly identified.