Opinions and Attitudes of Health Care Staff towards Mobile Phone Messaging

Abstract

Mobile phone text messaging (Short Message Service, SMS) has proved to be a powerful tool for many tasks in health care. However, this technology has not yet been deployed in the hospital environment in full scale. The goal of this study was to understand the attitudes, opinions and expectations of the hospital staff about the mobile phone messaging in health care in Seinäjoki Central Hospital, which is located in Western Finland. SMS based applications have been used in the hospital in psychiatric care and in various applications related to appointments. However, there are plans to extend the use of the mobile messaging tools on new areas in the hospital. For this reason, we needed the opinion data from the hospital personnel. We conducted a survey including structured questionnaire containing 19 questions on text messaging and multimedia messaging use in health care applications. The participants were allowed to give numerical opinion for each question, and also add free-text comments. We received 218 responses, and analyzed them numerically as well as based on the free-text feedback given by the participants. Although the survey results show good acceptance of the text messages as, for example, reminders of appointments, the participants expressed various concerns such as privacy matters and the risk of misunderstandings in the message content. The survey proved also to be a good way of sharing information about this new technology to be introduced in hospital environment.