The Enhanced Performance of Public Health Volunteer in Screening Patients with Depressive Disorder at Sa-roy Subdistrict, Wangchin District, Phrae Province

Abstract

Backgound:    Depression is the cause of suicide and is a major public health problem in every country around the world. From the data collection of mental health and drug work at Wang Chin District, suicides are likely to increase. The process of capacity development of health volunteers to provide screening for depressive disorders if it covers more at-risk populations will help reduce the morbidity, mortality rate from depression.

Objective:      To enhance the performance of the public health volunteer in screening patients with depressive disorder and to examine the results of the performance enhancement of the public health volunteer in screening patients with depressive disorder at Wangchin Subdistrict.

Study design: This participatory action research. The samples of this study included 71 public health volunteer and 1,118 subjects who aged more than 35 years old. The instruments used in this study were ones to investigate the community’s contexts and to enhance the performance of the public health volunteer. The statistic analysis in this qualitative study were frequency, percentage, mean, minimum, maximum, and standard deviation in order to investigate the comparison of difference in knowledge about depressive disorder, persuasive performance, skills in screening patients with depressive disorder which were analyzed with mean scores of the samples. Moreover, the qualitative data was examined with content analysis.

Result:           It was found that Wangchin Subdistrict is a rural community. The majority of the community members are farmers who have to work outside their community to make a living. This caused them to neglect their self-awareness in depressive disorder. In 2017, the results of the screened the subjects who aged more than 35 years old accounted to be 50 %. Most of the public health volunteer realized the knowledge about depressive disorder in moderate level, and they have persuasive performance in low level. In addition, they failed to pass the evaluation criterion for screening of depressive disorder in every activity.

Conclusion:    The suggestions from this research are that the screening procedures of depressive disorder require participatory working process and learning among the public health volunteer, risk population, and the patients themselves. It can also result in the coverage of screening procedures of public health volunteer in depressive disorder and other non-communicable diseases in the community. 

Keywords:      The Enhanced Performance of Public Health Volunteer, Screening Patients, Depressive Disorder