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Additional file 1. Template for Desk Review of Pre-Existing Information Relevant to Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in the Region/Country.

Additional file 4. Cultural Relevance Questionnaire (CRQ) English version.

Additional file 3. Phases of Thematic Analysis (Reprinted with permission from authors) Source: Braun V, Clarke V. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual Res Psychol. 2006;3(2):77–101.

Additional file 2. Focus Group Discussion Guide for Local Consultation.

There is evidence to suggest that simplified and lay facilitated psychological interventions could contribute to reducing human resource for mental health shortages and disparities among forcibly displaced migrants. The review aimed to identify the evidence for the effectiveness of scalable psychological interventions for this sub-populations and the barriers and facilitators to their implementation. A systematic review was conducted, using peer-reviewed evidence published up until September 2017. Quantitative and mixed methods intervention studies were screened from Medline, Embase, Scopus, PsychINFO and CINAHL. Only English-language studies in which non-specialists administered the intervention were included. Narrative synthesis was used to analyse the study findings on effectiveness and the barriers and facilitators to implementation were identified through thematic analysis. Out of 2,766 relevant citations and abstracts screened, 13 met the inclusion criteria. We found high quality evidence with mixed results on the effectiveness of Narrative Exposure Therapy in reducing PTSD symptoms in children and adults. Medium-high quality evidence was found for the effectiveness of parenting skills interventions in reducing children’s behavioural problems and for interventions with components of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in reducing psychological distress. High-quality evidence was also found for a simplified version of IPT-G administered by lay facilitators indicating significant reductions in depression symptoms among adolescent among girls, but not boys, aged 14-17 years. We also found medium-high quality evidence showing no effect of psycho-education in reducing psychological distress. Cultural adaptation was identified as a facilitator to implementation and the training of non-specialists was described as both a barrier and facilitator. There is scarce but good quality evidence for the effectiveness of scalable psychological interventions for forcibly displaced persons. Further research on the effectiveness of these interventions on adults is urgently needed. Future studies should detail the process of adapting the training material, the supervision, and training received by non-specialists to assess fidelity, allow future replications, and facilitate scale-up.

While community resilience is said to have gained a lot of traction politically and given credence by disaster management professionals, this perception is not always shared by the individual members of communities. One solution to addressing the difficulty of individuals ‘conceptualising’ the benefits of resilience can be through the use of community workshops as a method of facilitating resilience awareness. Participatory workshops can be created to facilitate a “bottom-up” approach, with the aims of raising awareness and increasing the likelihood of resilient behaviours being adopted. Within the European project ‘DRIVER’ we have tested CART (Community Advancing Resilience Toolkit) as a means to increase resilience. This framework has an added benefit of bringing community members together regarding resilience, increasing their awareness of resilience and improving community cohesion through the exchange of ideas throughout the process. The methodology employs the use of a range of participatory methods including an assessment survey, key informant interviews, data collection framework, community conversations, neighbourhood infrastructure maps, community ecological maps, stakeholder analysis, SWOT analysis, capacity and vulnerability assessment. Eight workshops were held in Scotland pairing the CART toolkit’s framework with recent British Red Cross resilience thinking in order to raise the awareness of resilience among a broad range of rural and urban communities. The overall result is that members of communities became more aware of their own vulnerabilities and capabilities, both at the individual and collective level, encouraging action as to increase their resilience.

As a result of societal changes like citizen empowerment and increasing attention for strengthening community resilience, relationships between citizens and professional responders in crisis management are changing. Citizens actively deal with crises themselves, implying adjustments to professional procedures. To provide professionals with support to understand the actual resilience of a community we developed a dashboard that provides insight into both the vulnerability of a selected community (for example elderly) and capacities. Capacities were based on indicators of resilience adapted from the multi-level Community Engagement Theory of Douglas Paton. We discussed this dashboard with professionals in interviews and focus groups. The results showed that professionals mostly wanted to know the location of less self-reliant inhabitants (vulnerability) and key persons and characteristics of social networks (capacities). Professionals were most sceptical with regard to the reliability of the data. Ideally, it should be based on existing data bases, but at the same time, not all relevant information is registered and this information is quite general. Our study confirms that having access to information about the level of resilience of communities seems to have a great potential in supporting professional responders in crisis management. Yet knowledge about communities’ levels of resilience or sharing information is not enough and comes with limitations. What is more important is that structural collaboration between citizen communities and professionals is facilitated. This collaboration should already start in the preparation phase and continues throughout all phases in crisis management.

Background: Humanitarian workers operate in traumatic contexts, putting them at an increased risk of adverse mental health outcomes. The quality of the support they receive from their organization, their supervisor, and team members are proposed as determinants of mental illness and well-being, via the stress-appraisal process. Objective: Grounded in organizational support theory, we sought to understand the relationship between organizational factors, including perceived organizational support, supervisor support, and team support, and indicators of both adverse mental health and mental well-being among humanitarian volunteers. This relationship is hypothesized to be mediated by the perceived psychological stress. Methods: A sample of 409 humanitarian volunteers from the Sudanese Red Crescent Society completed an online, anonymous, survey comprised of the Perceived Supervision, Perceived Organizational Support, Team Support, and Perceived Psychological Stress scales, as well as the Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Patient Health Questionnaire scales, (GAD-7 and PHQ- 8), and the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale. Study objectives were tested using structural equation modelling (SEM) procedures. Results: Perceived helplessness (PH) and perceived self-efficacy (PSE), as measures of psychological stress, were both found to fully mediate the relationship between perceived organizational support and mental health outcomes. Perceived organizational support was associated with PSE and inversely with PH. PH was associated with adverse mental health and inversely related to mental well-being. PSE was only associated with mental well-being. Perceived supervision was negatively associated with PSE. Conclusions: Perceived organizational support is a key determinant of the mental health of humanitarian volunteers, with greater perceived support associated with lower distress symptomology and greater mental well-being. Humanitarian agencies should take actions to improve their internal organization support systems to mitigate the stress associated with working in traumatic contexts. Specifically, more attention should be paid to the organizational support of the volunteers as front-line workers in humanitarian settings. • Perceived organizational support is associated with both negative and positive aspects of humanitarian volunteers’ mental health.• Perceived psychological stress factors, including perceived helplessness and perceived self-efficacy, mediate the relationship between perceived organizational support and mental health.• Supervision and team support, as key components of managerial systems, are essential contributors to perceived organizational support within the humanitarian sector.• Organizational support theory is a useful framework to understand how organizational factors contribute to the well-being of humanitarian workers, especially volunteers.