The World Health Organisation stated: “Primary care mental health services in Europe are under-developed with long waiting times to receive treatment in the community, resulting in significant costs to individuals, communities and economies. This lack of capacity is associated with insufficient numbers of trained workers with appropriate mental health skills.” The Mental Health Action Plan for Europe recommended that priority be given to the development of new education and training initiatives; an example of which is the Primary Care Graduate Mental Health Worker role, which demonstrated that trainees without prior mental health experience could be quickly trained to enhance primary care mental health services. Aims were: to adapt the Primary Care Graduate Mental Health Worker Programme (PCGMHWP) so as to provide a new, non-tertiary vocational programme to train community mental health workers. This would increase the scope and range of mental health training and help to build capacity in primary care mental health in the United Kingdom, Poland, Slovenia, Lithuania and Greece as a model for other EU countries to explore. Objectives were: To develop, accredit and evaluate a new, level three vocational programme to train 20 community mental health workers in each partner country.Consortium: comprised a leading UK mental health charity, two Higher Education establishments (UK and Poland), two not-for-profit social care organisations (Slovenia and Lithuania) and the Mental Health Centre (Agrinio Hospital) in Greece. This diverse partnership had significant experience in teaching, service delivery and development and research in the field of mental health and social care.Outputs: level three vocational programme to train community mental health workers, with a common 10 Essential Shared Capabilities (ESC) framework in each country mapped to EQF level 3; Evaluation report; Mental Health Training Toolkit.Outcomes: An increase in primary care mental health capacity; interventions for low to moderate mental health problems to facilitate recovery, both mental and economical (eg reduction of work absences through stress).Impact: The project provided a flexible training programme template for those wishing ti implement their own community mental health worker training programmes, based on the 10 ESCs. The community mental health training toolkit, incorporating this flexible framework, is now publicly available on the project web site.