Abstract
Nurses are predisposed to developing depression which is a common mental health problem. They experience depression more than the general population due to the nature of their work. Untreated, depression can lead to a poor quality of life and reduced productivity at the place of work. The purpose of the study was to assess the prevalence and factors associated with depression among nurses working at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital. The research targeted a population of 1050 nurses working at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital. A crosssectional design was employed. Stratified sampling technique was used to select 281 study participants from the targeted population. To triangulate the study, the following research instruments were used to harvest data, these included: a structured questionnaire to collect information on the sociodemographic and workrelated characteristics of the nurses, Beck’s Depression Inventory to assess the symptoms of depression among nurses and Interview Schedules with the heads of nursing departments on factors associated with depression among nurses. To guarantee validity and reliability of the research instruments, a pilot study was conducted at Kapsabet County Hospital, Nandi County. After cleaning and coding, the raw data was entered into a data base. The STATA statistical software was used to analyze the data. Descriptive statistics was used to summarize the data. Bivariate and multivariate statistics was applied to examine relationships between the independent and dependent variables. The findings were presented using tables. The study sought approval by MMUST Institutional Review Board and Institutional Research and Ethics committee of Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, Moi University School of Medicine. Informed consent of participants was adhered to during the study. From the study, sociodemographic characteristics had a significant relationship with depression levels. The social demographic characteristics that showed significant relationship in this context included gender, age and marital status. Gender showed a statistically significant relationship with pvalue of 0.000, age variable had a pvalue of 0.015, marital status had a pvalue of 0.007 while religion showed an insignificant relationship with pvalue 0.718. It was also evident, that workrelated factors had a strong relationship with the depression status. Some of the workrelated factors in this study included education level, department, shift, income and religion. Majority of these variables showed a statistically significant relationship, i.e. education level had a pvalue 0.002, department had a pvalue of 0.014, shift had a pvalue of 0.013, income pvalue of 0.008, responsibility with pvalue 0.001 while work experience showed an insignificant relationship evidenced by the pvalue of 0.553 which is greater than the threshold value of 0.05. On the basis of the study findings, the researcher recommends that the policy makers at MTRH should formulate policies that will help prevent depression among nurses and improve service delivery.