Conception of health professionals who work in emergency mental health

Abstract

This study compared the conceptions about mental illness of administrative professionals, nurses and doctors of emergency health services in the city of Londrina, PR. The design was cross-sectional, using the Opinions about Mental Illness (OMI) scale with a random sample of 30% of the professionals, totaling 96 subjects in the period 2010 to 2011. The data was statistically analyzed by the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS); with two factors of the OMI scale and nurses, there was normality in the sampling distribution. The Kruskall-Wallis test indicated a significant variation with respect to four of the seven factor components of the OMI (p <0.05). The professionals that work in emergency health services require training in the area of mental health, and there is a need for further studies on this topic, with a larger number of subjects.