City Research Online

Abstract

In low-resource settings, working age adults suffer a disproportionately higher mental health burden due to precarious work environments; yet access to evidence-based worksite mental health promotion programs remains severely limited due to the lack of professional service providers. Alternative mental wellness programs that are affordable, accessible and help build resilience to deal with the daily demands of work and life need to be introduced in workplaces of low-resource contexts. Such programs should however be acceptable and of social importance to the targeted contexts. Acceptance-based approaches meet these criteria but have mainly been implemented and evaluated in high-income countries. Gauging the appropriateness of such programs for low-resource workplace settings before wide-scale implementation is necessary. We engaged n = 14 mental health providers living and working in Kampala-Uganda in a one-day workshop focused on using acceptance and commitment training in the workplace. During in-depth interviews, these providers shared feedback on the social importance of the program’s goals and effects, and acceptability of the program’s procedures to Ugandan society. A deductive thematic approach was used to analyze data (codes organized according to a priori thematic categories that aligned with the Social Validity Framework). Findings showed that the program’s goals and effects were gauged as socially significant and the training process was acceptable. However, key adjustments were recommended, including introducing communal values into the program, reducing session load, integrating mental health awareness strategies, and adding contextually relevant metaphors. These adjustments are likely to enhance the appropriateness of this type of acceptance-based worksite mental health promotion program for use in Uganda.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright: © 2024 Musanje et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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