Prevention and intervention in first infancy mental health from Primary Care settings

Today exist a very wide consensus on the efficacy, efficiency and accessibility to some preventive mental health programs addressed to the early childhood. The existing programs can be specific and unspecific but, in general terms, there are two ways of organizing the main programs of mental health prevention in childhood: the University and its institutions and the health assistance organizations. This is at least the case in Europe. In Spain, for example, preventive programs of this kind are being developed by some Universities, but especially by health assistance networks, mainly local but also at regional and national level. In both cases, these programs can be classified between those based on `ad hoc settings` and those based on clinical settings. The paper presents some suggestion about one special group of the last kind of programs: the preventive programs based on centres of Primary Health Care: primary health teams; local networks that take care of nearly marginal population; the Administration (Direction of Public Health of the Generalitat of Catalonia); and at the top the Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine.