Abstract
Background Understanding mental health treatment preferences of adolescents and youth is particularly important for interventions to be acceptable and successful. Person-centered care mandates empowering individuals to take charge of their own health rather than being passive recipients of services. Methods We conducted a discrete choice experiment to quantitatively measure adolescent treatment preferences for different care characteristics and explore tradeoffs between these. A total of 153 pregnant adolescents were recruited from two primary healthcare facilities in the informal urban settlement of Nairobi. We selected eight attributes of depression treatment option models drawn from literature review and previous qualitative work. Bayesian d-efficient design was used to identify main effects. A total of ten choice tasks were solicited per respondent. We evaluated mean preferences using mixed logit models to adjust for within subject correlation and account for unobserved heterogeneity. Results Respondents showed a positive preference that caregivers be provided with information sheets, as opposed to co-participation with caregivers. With regards to treatment options, the respondents showed a positive preference for 8 sessions as compared to 4 sessions. With regards to intervention delivery agents, the respondents had a positive preference for facility nurses as compared to community health volunteers. In terms of support, the respondents showed positive preference for parenting skills as compared to peer support. Our respondents expressed negative preferences of ANC service combined with older mothers as compared to adolescent friendly services and of being offered refreshments alone. A positive preference was revealed for combined refreshments and travel allowance over travel allowance or refreshments alone. A number of these suggestions were about enhancing their experience of maternity clinical care experience. Conclusion This study highlights unique needs of this population. Pregnant adolescents’ value responsive maternity and depression care services offered by nurses. Participants shared preference for longer psychotherapy sessions and their preference was to have adolescent centered maternal mental health and child health services within primary care.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0273274 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-17 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 8 Mar 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Research reported in this publication was supported by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number K43TW010716-05. The content is solely the authors’ responsibility and does not necessarily represent the National Institutes of Health’s official views. The first author was funded by the Fogarty Foundation K43 grant (2018-2023), and the coauthors are her mentors and collaborators in this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Kumar 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.
Funding
Research reported in this publication was supported by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number K43TW010716-05. The content is solely the authors’ responsibility and does not necessarily represent the National Institutes of Health’s official views. The first author was funded by the Fogarty Foundation K43 grant (2018-2023), and the coauthors are her mentors and collaborators in this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Fogarty Foundation | 2018-2023 |
| National Institutes of Health | K43TW010716-05 |
| National Institutes of Health | |
| Fogarty International Center |
