INFLUENCE OF DEMOGRAPHIC VARIABLES AND PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS ON PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS AMONG HEALTH WORKERS IN LUTH LAGOS
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The Nigerian health sector is one of the most important and pivotal sectors for the Nigerian economy, its workers though constantly been looked down upon
have always been doing their best in ensuring a healthy nations, this is because as the saying goes, that a healthy nation is a wealthy nation. For Nigeria to achieve its economic goals and objectives, the health sector and indeed its workers must be adequately looked are.
In ensuring that health workers in Nigeria are adequately taken care of a lot of factors must be considered; chief amongst these factors are the influence of
demographic variables and personality traits on psychological distress of theses health workers. For workers and especially in the health sector to give their
best in ensuring a healthy nation, they must be psychological fit and alert to render their service. The personality traits and demographic variables are so
important in achieving health workers psychological stability since these workers are constantly being exposed to health hazards.
Psychological distress is widely used as an indicator of the mental health of the population in public health, in population surveys and in epidemiological
studies and, as an outcome, in clinical trials and intervention studies. Yet the concept of psychological distress is still vague for some. Indeed, a closer look at
the scientific literature shows that the expression “psychological distress” is oen
applied to the undifferentiated combinations of symptoms ranging from
depression and general anxiety symptoms to personality characteristics, functional disabilities and behavioural problems. The aim of this chapter is to
provide a critical review of the clinical features, assessment and prevalence of psychological distress of health workers and of the empirical evidence on the
risk and protective factors associated with psychological distress in the general Nigerian population. Health Workers deserve special attention since they are
exposed to specific risk and protective factors that may modify the impact of more general factors.
