Lay-interviewer training protocol for the WHO Flexible Interview for ICD-11 for the National Mental Health Survey - 2...

The National Mental Health Survey-2 (NMHS-2) of India is to be conducted in 2024-2026, across the country with over 2,25,000 individual assessments. The survey is to use the Flexible Interview for ICD-11 (FLII-11), a structured diagnostic interview (SDI) consistent with ICD-11, newly developed by an international collaboration under the aegis of the World Health Organization (WHO), as the primary assessment instrument for the mental health morbidity. Lay-interviewers are to administer the FLII-11, and to compensate for their limited competency a 3-week training program has been developed to ensure reliable data collection.

This article serves as a formal documentation of the FLII-11 training protocol for the NMHS-2 including its development to help in its broader applicability and effective implementation across India beyond the NMHS-2.

The comprehensive training involves the lectures, video-demonstration, live-interviews, role plays and competency assessments. This training schema was piloted in the FLII-11 validation exercise at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, with lay-interviewers achieving at least 80% score when compared to the psychiatrist's ratings of test videos.

Assessment with SDIs ensures standardization of data collection and diagnostic precision. Training further minimizes human errors by ensuring uniformity in administration of the instrument. The FLII-11, being free to use when eventually published by the WHO, has the potential to be the SDI of choice with wide applications in clinical practice, research, and training in our country. The FLII-11 has been translated to 22 Indian languages for the NMHS-2, further widening its utility. The interviewer training resources (power-point presentations, training/rating videos, and scoring sheets) will be made available on request (https://www.elearn.nimhans.ac.in.), for those who have received permission of usage of FLII-11 from the WHO.