Understanding the information needs of public health practitioners: A literature review to inform design of an interactive digital knowledge management system

AbstractThe need for rapid access to information to support critical decisions in public health cannot be disputed; however, development of such systems requires an understanding of the actual information needs of public health professionals. This paper reports the results of a literature review focused on the information needs of public health professionals. The authors reviewed the public health literature to answer the following questions: (1) What are the information needs of public health professionals? (2) In what ways are those needs being met? (3) What are the barriers to meeting those needs? (4) What is the role of the Internet in meeting information needs? The review was undertaken in order to develop system requirements to inform the design and development of an interactive digital knowledge management system. The goal of the system is to support the collection, management, and retrieval of public health documents, data, learning objects, and tools.Method:The search method extended beyond traditional information resources, such as bibliographic databases, tables of contents (TOC), and bibliographies, to include information resources public health practitioners routinely use or have need to use—for example, grey literature, government reports, Internet-based publications, and meeting abstracts.Results:Although few formal studies of information needs and information-seeking behaviors of public health professionals have been reported, the literature consistently indicated a critical need for comprehensive, coordinated, and accessible information to meet the needs of the public health workforce. Major barriers to information access include time, resource reliability, trustworthiness/credibility of information, and “information overload”.Conclusions:Utilizing a novel search method that included the diversity of information resources public health practitioners use, has produced a richer and more useful picture of the information needs of the public health workforce than other literature reviews. There is a critical need for public health digital knowledge management systems designed to reflect the diversity of public health activities, to enable human communications, and to provide multiple access points to critical information resources. Public health librarians and other information specialists can serve a significant role in helping public health professionals meet their information needs through the development of evidence-based decision support systems, human-mediated expert searching and training in the use information retrieval systems

Beyond information behaviour: evidence based practice as sense-making in public health

Recent decades have seen a trend towards evidence based practice (EBP) in public health, which it is thought will ensure improvements in health by emphasising the use of robust evidence. Library and Information professionals can support EBP by understanding the behaviour of their users in relation to evidence. This thesis explores how public health practitioners use information for sense-making in their work. The conceptualisation of sensemaking is derived from Brenda Dervin’s sense-making methodology, which provides a holistic understanding of ‘information use’. This approach is advantageous in supporting conceptualisation of information use as a social and communicative behaviour where views and perceptions of other people affect the behaviour of the individual. This contrasts to the approach taken by previous studies of information behaviour in public health, which have mainly been concerned with use of information services and systems. The thesis addresses research questions on what situations and gaps in understanding are experienced by public health workers, how they use information to make sense of those situations and progress their work, and what barriers they experience during sense-making. Data from semi-structured interviews and vignettes with a group of UK based public health practitioners is analysed using Grounded Theory methods, to create a substantive theory of how sense-making is undertaken by the participants. This theory provides an understanding of how participants perceive, interact with and construct public health evidence. An acceptance of the concept of EBP as a way of interacting with information is found to be the core driver behind the way in which participants interact with information and with other people. EBP integrates elements of participants’ perceptions of evidence and how these perceptions, alongside other elements of knowledge and past experience affect the participants’ ideas about the potential usefulness of information as part of strategies to influence others