Information needs of health care workers in developing countries: a literature review with a focus on Africa.

Frederick Bukachi,Neil Pakenham-Walsh

doi:10.1186/1478-4491-7-30

Abstract

Health care workers in developing countries continue to lack access to basic, practical information to enable them to deliver safe, effective care. This paper provides the first phase of a broader literature review of the information and learning needs of health care providers in developing countries.A Medline search revealed 1762 papers, of which 149 were identified as potentially relevant to the review. Thirty-five of these were found to be highly relevant. Eight of the 35 studies looked at information needs as perceived by health workers, patients and family/community members; 14 studies assessed the knowledge of health workers; and 8 looked at health care practice.The studies suggest a gross lack of knowledge about the basics on how to diagnose and manage common diseases, going right across the health workforce and often associated with suboptimal, ineffective and dangerous health care practices. If this level of knowledge and practice is representative, as it appears to be, it indicates that modern medicine, even at a basic level, has largely failed the majority of the world's population. The information and learning needs of family caregivers and primary and district health workers have been ignored for too long. Improving the availability and use of relevant, reliable health care information has enormous potential to radically improve health care worldwide.

Highlights

In developing countries, many health care workers have little or no access to basic, practical information [1,2,3]
This review provides a preliminary glimpse of the journal literature on the information needs of health workers in developing countries, and ways in which information needs can be assessed
What is known about the health information needs of health workers in developing countries?

Summary

Introduction

Many health care workers have little or no access to basic, practical information [1,2,3]. Some important steps have been made towards meeting the information needs of the "upper" echelons of health professions (research and tertiary care), but remarkably little progress has been achieved in meeting the information needs of primary and district health care providers in the developing world [4,5,6]. This disparity is due to several factors, including unequal distribution of Internet connectivity, and a failure of international "information for development" policies and initiatives, which have tended to focus on "innovative" Internetbased approaches for higher-level health professionals and researchers while ignoring, relatively speaking, other approaches that remain essential for the vast majority of primary and district health workers. The full text of articles identified as highly likely to be relevant were retrieved, and these articles provide the basis for this review

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Conclusion