Where doctors read Health Information Resources and their Information Resources media references

Abstract

This study was designed to find out the extent of use of health information resources from available locations by doctors in six teaching hospitals in South East, Nigeria and their resources media preferences. The survey research design was adopted for the study. A structured questionnaire with reliability co-efficient of 0.97 was used to survey the opinions of 1,995 doctors of the ranks of house officers, senior house officers, registrars, senior registrars and consultants who constitute the population for the study. Descriptive statistics were used in analyzing data. The results showed: that personal internet connection is the most frequently used; that medical libraries and hospital internet connections are not used; that doctor’s media of assessing health information are the internet, electronic databases, textbooks, journals and colleagues, in this order of preference. It was therefore recommended amongst others that the federal and state ministries of health and teaching hospital managements in South East Nigeria should equip and sustain clinics, offices and libraries with adequate internet facilities.

Keywords: health information, health information utilization, information resource preferences, medical doctors