Knowledge And Attitude And Associated Factors To Ward Mental Illness Among Health Professionals Working In Government & Private Health Facilities At Dilla Town, South Ethiopia

Abstract

Background: - Mental illness is an important determinant of the quality of life of individuals. The negative attitude and negative beliefs toward mental illness even among health professionals is still persisting and lead to widespread stigma and poor help seeking behavior among people with mental illness. In Ethiopia, there is little research done on assessing the knowledge and attitudes of health professionals and this study will narrow this great gap.Objective: -To assess the knowledge and attitude of health professionals toward mental illness at governmental and private health facilities at Dilla town.Methods: Facility based cross-sectional study design was employed. The data were collected by using self-administered questionnaire with a total of 126 health professionals. Study participants were drawn using a simple random sampling method. Statistics investigation was done by using SPSS version 21. Descriptive statistics & logistic regression was done and the result was discussed and presented by frequency tables, graphs, and charts. Variables with p-value < 0.05 were declared as having substantial association between factors and the outcome variables. THE Result: The level of knowledge on mental illness among health professionals was 43.8%. Regarding Attitude of Health professionals toward mental illness, 59.6% were holding an unfavorable attitude. Respondents who have had high awareness have 0.025 times better attitude than those who have no control group. However, this association is not significant. (AOR=0.025, 95% C.I: 0.035, 0.085). In this study the level of literacy, contact with a mental ill, individual level of qualification, psychiatric training experience, and long duration of working experience have a strong positive impact on the attitude of health professionals to the psychiatric ills.Conclusion and Recommendation: The outcome of the study revealed the studied participants had an apparently unfavorable attitudes regarding psychiatric illness associated with lower levels of literacy. This finding was used as the screening attitude by empowering health professionals regarding their knowledge toward mental illness. Over half of the health professionals held an unfavorable attitude toward mental illness. This gives a direction to do more on emphasizing of developing awareness creation and expanding psychiatric training to empower attitude of health professionals toward mental illness.