Information needs and seeking behaviour among health professionals working at public hospital and health centres in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

Abstract

BackgroundUniversal access to information for health professionals is a need to achieve “health for all strategy.” A large proportion of the population including health professionals have limited access to health information in resource limited countries. The aim of this study is to assess information needs among Ethiopian health professionals.MethodsA cross sectional quantitative study design complemented with qualitative method was conducted among 350 health care workers in Feburary26-June5/2012. Pretested self-administered questionnaire and observation checklist were used to collect data on different variables. Data entry and data analysis were done using Epi-Info version 3.5.1 and by SPSS version19, respectively. Descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analyses were applied to describe study objectives and identify the determinants of information seeking behaviours respectively. Odds ratio with 95% CI was used to assess the association between a factor and an outcome variable.ResultsThe majority of the respondents acknowledged the need of health information to their routine activities. About 54.0% of respondents lacked access to health information. Only 42.8% of respondents have access to internet sources. Important barriers to access information were geographical, organizational, personal, economic, educational status and time. About 58.0% of the respondents accessed information by referring their hard copies and asking senior staff. Age, sex, income, computer literacy and access, patient size, work experience and working site were significantly associated with information needs and seeking behaviour.ConclusionsThe health information seeking behaviour of health professional was significant. The heaklth facilities had neither informationcenter such as library, nor internet facilities. Conducting training on managing health information, accessing computer and improving infrastructures are important interventions to facilitate evidence based descions.

Evidence-based information needs of public health workers: a systematized review

“…Quantitative studies most often used descriptive statistics and tested bivariate relationships using chi-square or t -test methods. Several studies calculated odds ratios [10, 37, 38]. …”

“…Overall, response rates ranged from 25%–100%, with a median of 65%. In 10 studies, the authors did not acknowledge or address possible biases in their research [25, 26, 29, 31, 37, 39, 40–43]. …”

“…Twenty studies were devoted to examining the information needs of public health workers [11–14, 26–28, 30–33, 35–37, 42, 44–47]. Participants self-reported these needs, usually from a list of items in a survey.…”

“…Twenty studies discussed current information-seeking behavior and the use of information [11–13, 24, 26–28, 30, 32–37, 41–43, 46–48]. Data were collected by asking which information sources public health workers used in their work, usually in the form of a list.…”

“…Journal articles were identified as one of the main sources of information across participant types [13, 26, 28, 32, 33, 35, 46, 49]. Many public health workers used colleagues as a source of information, often more frequently than they used online databases or librarians [12, 13, 27, 37, 42, 44, 48, 49]. Librarians were not a heavily used resource, and there was a prevailing lack of knowledge about the role of librarians and the services they could provide [11, 13, 26, 28, 29, 46].…”