Validation of a brief mental health screening tool for common mental disorders in primary healthcare.

CONCLUSIONS: Using a higher specificity index, the positive predictive value and NPV show that at higher cut-point values the BMH not only helps identify individuals with alcohol misuse, depression and anxiety symptoms but also identifies a majority of those who do not have symptoms (true negatives), thus not overburdening nurses with false positives needing assessment. Research is needed to assess whether use of such a short and valid screening tool is generalisable to other clinic contexts as well as how mental health screening should best be introduced into routine clinic functioning and practice. PMID: 31084695 [PubMed - in process]
Source: South African Medical Journal - Category: African Health Tags: S Afr Med J Source Type: research