Knowledge, Attitude and Practice towards care provision to mentally ill persons among Nurses working in Public health facilities in Ghana

Abstract

Background: Many people are suffering from moderate to severe mental illness and other mental problems and only 1.2% receive the needed treatment from public health facilities leaving remaining untreated. Most of these mentally ill patients and persons are yet to be recognized, diagnosed, and managed properly. Assessing the knowledge, attitude and practice of nurses was necessary to address and solve this burden. Objective: To assess knowledge, attitude and practice among nurses toward mental care provision in Ghana. Methods: Health facility based cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted. The data was collected from 201 nurses using structured and google survey of knowledge, attitude and practice questionnaire which was adapted and modified from studies by Mariam & A, 2016; Ahmed et al., 2019 and Ganiah et al., 2017. Respondents were selected using simple random sampling methods. Data were collected and entered into google sheet and exported to SPSS version 26.0 for analysis. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression were performed to identify socio-demographic variables and other factors which may have significant association with knowledge, attitude and practice toward mental care provision. The significance level of association was determined by p-value less than or equal to 0.05. Results: A total of 201 respondents participated in this study with a response rate of 91.4%. One hundred and sixty-nine, 84.1% were females. Majority of the respondents, 54.2% were between the ages of 20-29years. Also, 64.7% of the respondents had adequate knowledge, 11.4% had favorable attitude and 67.7 % of the nurses had good practice. In the bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis, registered community nurses or CHNs were 66% less likely to have good practice (aOR= 0.33, 95% CI= [0.149, 0.735], p<0.05) than enrolled nurses toward mental care provision. Diploma nurses were over two (2) times more likely to have good practice (aOR= 2.21, 95% CI= [1.193, 4.087], p<0.05) than certificate nurses. Nurses who provide outpatient and inpatient services were 15 more times likely to have good practice (aOR= 15.75, 95% CI= [5.340, 46.479], p=0.001) than nurses who do not provide any mental care. Conclusion and recommendation: More than half of the nurses have adequate knowledge, good practice and less than half of the participants have favorable attitude. The unfavorable attitude may have affected the quality of mental health care delivery to mentally ill persons. Nurses’ capacity building as well as WHO mental health gaps actions adapted and supportive supervision should be strengthened to improve quality mental health care delivery.