Information needs of health care workers in developing countries: a literature review with a focus on Africa
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BioMed Central
Open Access
Review
Information needs of health care workers in developing countries: a literature review with a focus on Africa Neil Pakenham-Walsh*1 and Frederick Bukachi1,2 Address: 1Global Healthcare Information Network, Charlbury, Oxford, UK and 2Department of Medical Physiology, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya Email: Neil Pakenham-Walsh* - [email protected]; Frederick Bukachi - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 8 April 2009 Human Resources for Health 2009, 7:30
doi:10.1186/1478-4491-7-30
Received: 21 April 2008 Accepted: 8 April 2009
This article is available from: http://www.human-resources-health.com/content/7/1/30 © 2009 Pakenham-Walsh and Bukachi; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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.
Background In developing countries, many health care workers have little or no access to basic, practical information [1-3]. Indeed, many have come to rely on observation, advice from colleagues and building experience empirically through their own treatment successes and failures. In the last decade, 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 meet-
ing the information needs of primary and district health care providers in the developing world [4-6]. This disparity is due
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