Post-traumatic stress disorder : interventional training of primary health care physicians in displaced camps

Abstract EN

Objective: Internally displaced persons are people who are forced to flee their homes but unlike refugees, they remain within their country’s borders.

This migration may result from armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters.

Primary care physicians have been shown to lack the necessary training to provide appropriate diagnosis and treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

In addition, they report feeling unprepared and unsure in their work with trauma survivors.

The aim of this study was to improve the knowledge of primary health care physicians in early detection and rehabilitation of patients with posttraumatic stress disorder among internally displaced persons in Kurdistan region, Iraq.

Methods: An interventional (pre, post-test) study was conducted in primary health care centers in the camps of internally displaced persons in Erbil city in Kurdistan region-Iraq, during the period from the 1st of November 2017 to the end of February 2018, were 67 physicians with different specialties from all primary health care centers who agree to participate in the time of the study were included.

Data were collected through self-administered questionnaire by physicians.

This questionnaire and assessment are comprises two papers (socio-demographic and knowledge paper).

Results: The mean±(SD) age and years of practice of participants was 38.6±6.9 years and 13.7±5.6 years, respectively.

Male constituted 64.2% of the participants.

Before training the overall mean knowledge score was 0.24, which increased to 0.68 after training, and also increased to 0.62 after the second round of testing after training.

The overall knowledge score of first round oftesting after training, (0.68), was significantly higher than before training (0.24), and the second round of testing after training (0.62).

In addition, the scores after the second round of testing after training was significantly lower than that after the first round of testing after training (p<0.001).

Conclusions: The knowledge regarding post-traumatic stress disorder for physicians before training are obviously poor and were only enough for referral of suspected cases to psychiatrists, and after training the post-traumatic stress disorder knowledge of physicians were improved.