Mental health status and quality of life among Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand

Laohasiriwong, Wongsa; Chamroen, Pall; Samphors, Sim; Rachutorn, Thiwakorn; S. Dewey, Rebecca; Pisey, Vong

Abstract

Background: Migrant workers have become a major issue for Thailand. Most of the migrants are from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Most are employed in jobs referred to as the “3 Ds”; difficult, dangerous and dirty. However, little is known concerning the living and working conditions, or health-related quality of life of these migrant workers. This study aims to determine factors influencing the quality of life of Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 1,211 Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand, using multistage random sampling from eight districts of the two provinces (Sa Kaeo and Surin) with a structured questionnaire interview. The WHOQOL-BREF was used to measure Quality of Life (QOL) with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.77. Mental health status was assessed using the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.83. Descriptive statistics provide participant characteristics. Multilevel logistic regression (MLR) were used to determine which factors significantly impacted the outcome measures in terms of the adjusted odds ratio (AOR). P[less than]0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results: About one third of these migrant workers had a poor quality of life (34.52%; 95%CI: 31.84-37.20), and had moderate-to-high levels of stress (67.96%; 95%CI: 65.33-70.59), and symptoms of depression (69.69%; 95%CI: 67.10-72.29). After controlling other covariate factors, the factors associated with poor QOL were a high level perceived of stress (AOR=3.64; 95%CI: 2.41-5.49; p[less than]0.001); living with family and relatives (AOR=3.63; 95%CI: CI 2.42-5.45; p[less than]0.001); and housing being provided by their employer (AOR=2.66; 95%CI: 1.74-4.08; p[less than]0.001).
Conclusion: Stress was strongly associated with QOL. The living environment was found to be the next most influential factor on QOL. Mental health programs aimed at helping migrant workers to cope with stress and to improve their living conditions will help improve QOL in the target group.

Citation

Laohasiriwong, W., Chamroen, P., Samphors, S., Rachutorn, T., S. Dewey, R., & Pisey, V. (2020). Mental health status and quality of life among Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand. F1000Research, 9, Article 1138. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.25419.2

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 16, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Sep 25, 2020
• Publication Date: Sep 25, 2020
• Deposit Date: Oct 1, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 10, 2020
• Journal: F1000Research
• Print ISSN: 2046-1402
• Publisher: F1000Research
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 9
• Article Number: 1138
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.25419.2
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4929878
• Publisher URL: https://f1000research.com/articles/9-1138/v2
• Additional Information: Referee status: Awaiting Peer Review; Grant Information: The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work; Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.