Shabnam Sardar is the mental health promotion lead with NHS Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale, the primary care trust (PCT) responsible for commissioning health services for the metropolitan borough of Rochdale, and at times he admits to feeling daunted by the task.

Rochdale borough lies within Greater Manchester and is one of the most deprived in England, with a large south-Asian black and minority ethnic population.

Sardar's job is to map needs and commission services and programmes to promote the mental health and wellbeing of the whole borough, from newborns to older people, from children in schools to people in the workplace and in prison.

She trained originally as a social worker, and worked with people with learning disabilities before moving on to a job with the newly established Rochdale carer's resource service. "We got Beacon status [a recognition of excellence and innovation in further education], which was fantastic. Then I saw the mental health promotion lead job advertised. The challenge and the variety of the role attracted me - it's not disappointed me yet."

She has been in the post for just over two years. "I love the fact that this role is so varied. Every day brings a new challenge. So much of my work as a social worker was about crisis management, and I found that so frustrating. This job is about what we need to do before people get to that stage - it's not rocket science. But it is amazing how many people don't see it that way."

She admits it can be frustrating to have to argue the financial benefits of mental health promotion. "It's hard to get people to understand that mental health underpins all health and wellbeing, and that improving mental health can lead to better physical health and can reduce and even prevent the risk of some mental health problems."

Sardar has recently completed a mental health promotion strategy for the borough. "The strategy has been developed over 18 months of really thorough consultation. We set up a Big Brother-style diary room on World Mental Health Day for people to tell us what they thought we should do locally, and the local Mind media group made a DVD of the interviews. I was amazed. Loads of people came in and we got lots of information. What you do can only be enhanced by the information you gather and the people you speak to. I have always found service users and carers very forthcoming in their views about what would and would not work and I really value that. Now that the strategy is done, it's time to put it into practice."

A lot of the work necessarily involves meetings: "I manage seven task groups, covering seven main areas of intervention, with representatives from other statutory and voluntary organisations and service users and carers. I also attend eight or nine monthly meetings with various multi-agency teams responsible for different care groups - children and young people, older adults, and the mental health local implementation team. That's important, because it's about building capacity and ensuring mental health and wellbeing is on everyone's agenda and in everyone's strategies."

She reports to the newly formed mental health and wellbeing commissioning team. This, she says, is a big step forward: "It's the fact that wellbeing is in there, that it's not just about commissioning mental health services. The mental health service agenda is very focused on service delivery. In the 1999 national service framework for mental health, mental health promotion got just 0.1% of the spend in England - I would like to see it take a much bigger slice of the cake in the new national service framework for mental health."

Among the programmes that she has been able to fund are two social prescribing schemes: a very successful Books on Prescription scheme with GPs and the council library services; and a new Arts for Wellbeing scheme in conjunction with the local leisure and cultural trust Link4Life and the local Mind association. She also has funding for a social marketing campaign to raise awareness of mental health issues among men, which launches later this spring. "Exciting times," as she says.

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NHS Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale: hmr.nhs.uk