Abstract:
Introduction: Mental health disorders are highly prevalent in Ethiopia which is known to result in substantial disability. Improving the knowledge, attitude and practice of the primary health care workers is important to reduce this problem. Hence, this study was focused at assessing knowledge, attitude, and practice towards mental illness among health extension professionals of Adama city, oromia, Ethiopia.
Objective: To assess knowledge, attitude and practice of health extension professionals towards mental illness in Adama city, oromia, Ethiopia, 2019 E.C.
Methods: Cross sectional study was conducted based on structured self-administered knowledge attitude and practice questionnaires to assess knowledge, attitude and practice of 68 HEPs towards mental illness. The data was entered and analyzed using SPSS version 20. Descriptive statistics was performed to describe the study population. The variables association was expressed in odds ratio with 95% confidence interval.
Results: In this study 88 health extension professionals were participated with the mean age of 30.96.This study showed that 50.0% of health extension professionals in Adama city had good knowledge, 51.5% had unfavorable attitude and 41.2% had good practice towards mental illness.
Conclusion and Recommendation: About half of HEPs had good knowledge, half had unfavorable attitude and less than half of them had good practice. Presence of having poor knowledge by half of HEPs and unfavorable practice by a little bit more than half of them decreased the HEPs practice of mental health service provision. Hence, providing refresher training to HEPs and fully implementing the national mental health strategy as well as proper clinical supervision and support to improve behavioral changes are recommended for Adama town health office.
