Community-Based Mental Health Rehabilitation Staffing and Trauma Therapy Completion in Post-Conflict South Sudan: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of Mobile Clinic Deployment Timing

Trauma therapy completion in post-conflict South Sudan depends on community-based rehabilitation staffing, yet the timing of mobile clinic deployment relative to staffing levels remains unexamined as a determinant of treatment completion. The design exploits variation in deployment timing across counties and compares changes in completion rates among counties with early versus late deployment, conditional on staffing intensity. Using the DHS Program indicator 'Current users most recent supply or information from a family planning clinic' (FP_SRCM_W_GFP) as a proxy for clinic contact, the analysis draws on 109 country-survey observations from 35 African countries between 1990 and 2023. The mean indicator value was 9.018 (SD = 12.67), with country values ranging from 0.20 in Gabon to 35.30 in Eritrea. The proposed estimator identifies the differential effect of staffing on completion under parallel trends and stable unit treatment assumptions. The contribution is a deployment-timing framework that reframes staffing as a time-varying exposure rather than a static input, with implications for mobile clinic scheduling in low-resource post-conflict settings.