Mental Health: Female health workers at risk

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Mulago National Referral Hospital held a prayer event  where health workers were urged to cast their burdens before the Lord in face of work related anxieties which are pushing some into mental distress.

At the event held on Tuesday recognise the work of female health workers as part of the International Women’s Day commemoration activities, the hospital Executive Director Dr Rosemary Byanyima said they are seeing more female health workers developing mental health related challenges, arising from both their private social responsibilities as women and their job having to take care of an often high and overwhelming number of sick people for long hours.

Byanyima would not put an exact figure to the number of female health workers affected but says they have recorded  several anecdotal stories where some even shy away from sharing what they are going through, only to be identified as mentally unstable by colleagues at work. She says, this is the reason they chose a mental health related theme to encourage health workers to seek help and also take time off to care for themselves as they care for others.

Mulago receives over a thousand outpatients per day reporting to the ten to eleven clinics that the hospital conducts daily for different health conditions. These are added to the hundreds of others who are in admission at any one point as the hospital is often over-stretched to house more than the official bed capacity of  between 1,500 to 1,800.

With such high volumes at the national referral facility, Dr Diana Atwine the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health said it’s not surprising that health workers are getting mental problems as they have to deal with suffering and loss at all times and yet they work with limited resources.

Atwine acknowledged that the hospital is working with very low health worker to patient ratios with staffing levels currently at less than fifty percent.

When these concerns were put to Prime Minister Dr Robinah Nabbanja, she said the government is slowly easing the pressure on Mulago by staffing the other seven National Referral hospitals with necessary human resource and health infrastructure such that the facility only gets to offer specialised healthcare.

Wondering why Mulago still receives malaria and Cesarean section cases, Nabbanja urged the public to utilise other health facilities and regional referral hospitals across the country and only report to Mulago when formally referred.

While the push for Mulago to exclusively  handle referrals has been on for quite some time, it has been inapplicable as Byanyima explains, that medical ethics cannot permit them to turn away the sick.

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