Development and validation of tool for screening occupational mental health and workplace factors influencing it

Introduction:Occupational mental health is one of the key entity for ideal work place. Earlier studies have identified certain workplace factors to influence the mental health of the worker. “Workload”, “Reward”, “Community”, “Control”, “Values” and “Fairness” are the key areas identified in occupational psychology that determine the mental health of the worker. An imbalance in these factors may lead to negative occupational mental health, i.e. burnout. The burnout, a psychological syndrome is combination of emotional exhaustion, depletion of compassion and sense of reduced accomplishment. To note, the concept of occupational mental health in nation with second largest workforce is nascent. Further, the utility of existing western tools in Indian context is limited by multiple factors such as less comprehensibly, culturally inappropriate, patented and other factors. Hence, a tool was developed to screen the occupational mental health and workplace areas. Methods and results:Conventional steps involved in psychological tool development, viz. construct identification, drafting of pertinent questions, content validation, field testing of questions and others were adopted. After series of steps, a tool for screening the occupational mental health consisting of 21 questions and screening the key constructs influencing the mental health at workplace (workplace assessment) consisting of 25 questions were developed. Each of these questions sought responses using a 3-point scale i.e. “Never”, “Sometimes” and “Always”. As intended, the questions were relatively simple, shorter, comprehensible and compliant (no rejections) as observed by the feedback obtained during the pilot (feasibility) study involving 58 consenting volunteers. The tool was explored on larger sample involving workforce from various occupational background in addition to screening of the general mental health using general health questionnaire 5 (GHQ 5). The screening tool exhibited adequate test - retest reliability, internal consistency / reliability (cronbach’s α > 0.73) and correlation (correlation coefficient > 0.6) with the general mental health in larger evaluation of 153 consenting workers. Conclusion: Present study attempted to develop tool for screening adverse occupational mental health (burnout) and workplace factors that are known to be detrimental for mental health. Considering the magnitude of workforce and relatively naïve the concept of occupational mental health in the country, a tool (such as the one reported in the study) for screening the mentioned constructs are need of the hour. Hence, the proposed simple and easy to administer tool, would aid in recognizing the burnout and aid in early diagnosis and management of those requiring intervention.