Nurses’ perceptions of mental healthcare in primary-care settings in Kenya

ABSTRACT

Kenya maintains an extraordinary treatment gap for mental health services because the need for and availability of mental health services are extraordinarily misaligned. One way to narrow the treatment gap is task-sharing, where specialists rationally distribute tasks across the health system, with many responsibilities falling upon frontline health workers, including nurses. Yet, little is known about how nurses perceive task-sharing mental health services. This article investigates nurses’ perceptions of mental healthcare delivery within primary-care settings in Kenya. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 60 nurses from a public urban (n = 20), private urban (n = 20), and public rural (n = 20) hospitals. Nurses participated in a one-hour interview about their perceptions of mental healthcare delivery. Nurses viewed mental health services as a priority and believed integrating it into a basic package of primary care would protect it from competing health priorities, financial barriers, stigma, and social problems. Many nurses believed that integrating mental healthcare into primary care was acceptable and feasible, but low levels of knowledge of healthcare providers, especially in rural areas, and few specialists, would be barriers. These data underscore the need for task-sharing mental health services into existing primary healthcare in Kenya.

KEYWORDS:

• Nurses
• Kenya
• mental health
• task-sharing

Acknowledgements

We are thankful for the great work of our research assistants C. Sophie Skoggard and Palmer Quamme. This study was approved by Institutional Review Boards at Georgetown University (United States) and Maseno University (Kenya).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by start-up research funds and an International Collaborative Research grant from Georgetown University.