Information Needs and Seeking Behavior among Health Professionals Working at Governmental Hospital and Health Centers in Bahir Dar Town, Amhara Region, Ethiopia.
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Date
2012-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Background: Universal access to information for health professionals is a pre requisite for meeting the MDGs and achieving health for all strategy. In developing countries, a large proportion of the population, including health professionals have no or only poor access to health information resources due to poor infrastructures, economic related, poor attention, etc
Objective: The purpose of this study is to assess information needs and seeking behavior of health professionals working at Governmental Hospitals and Health Centers in Bahir Dar town, Amhara Region, Ethiopia.
Methods: A cross sectional study design using quantitative and qualitative approaches was carried out to achieve the research objectives using 350 study participants. Self-administered questionnaire and observation checklist were instruments to collect the required data. Manually edited data were entered in to computer using Epi-info version 3.5.1; further cleaned and exported to SPSS statistics version19; then cleaned again and analyzed as needed. Frequencies, cross tabulation, chi-square, Odds ratio with 95%CI, and Binary logistic regression analysis were done to describe and assess associations among variables of interest.
Results: Nearly all (97.3%) of respondents reported that they need health information to update themselves and support daily activities. More than half (54%) encountered problems on their daily activities due to information limitation. Major barriers to access information were geographical, organizational, personal, economic related, educational status and time. Only 145 (42.8%) respondents have access to internet at different places with various frequencies and have shown statistically significant association (p <0.05) with age, sex, monthly income, computer literacy and access, patient seen per day, working experience, and working site. Majority of study participants have too much limited access to different information resources,especially library and internet. More than half (57.7%) respondents seek information by consulting their hard copies when there is a need. About 151(44.5%) respondents prefer to access on job trainings and soft copies next to hardcopies.
Conclusions and recommendations: Almost all respondents need to access health information and more than 80% of study areas have no library, internet and computer services. Therefore, great attentions and efforts must be done to help those starved health professionals working at those areas.
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Keywords
Information Needs,Health professionals