The Community Mental Health Team (CMHT) in Singapore provides home-based psychosocial rehabilitation services for people with severe mental illness (SMI). Besides the direct clinical intervention to the patients and their caregivers, the multidisciplinary team also collaborates with social and non-governmental organizations in the community. It provides training, consultation and support to these agencies so as to strenghten their capability in the understanding and management of people with SMI.

Since the inception of CMHT in April 2007, it has networked with family service centres, non-governmental mental health service providers, police, religious groups and other community partners. CMHT provides 2 types of mental health training programmes - basic and skill-based mental health training. The former programme introduces the participants to common mental disorders and the clinical services of CMHT. The latter programme is customized for the community partners and would entail the management of violent, aggressive and suicidal behaviours encountered in the settings of the community partners.

Effectiveness of the training is assessed by a pre- and post survey of the participants. Satisfaction score were also obtained from the participants.

Pre-knowledge of the participants were assessed to be of the range of 22.5% to 29.8%. This improves to 95.6 to 97.8 % after the training. At least 81 % of the participants were satisfied with the training.

It is important to train and engage social agencies and community partners so that people with SMI can experience a coordinated and seamless care in the community.