Integrating Health technologies in Health Services for Syrian Refugees in Lebanon: Qualitative study

Background: Lebanon currently hosts around one million Syrian refugees. There has been an increasing interest in integrating eHealth and mHealth technologies into the provision of primary health care to refugees and Lebanese citizens. Objective: We aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the potential for technology integration in primary health care provision in the context of the protracted Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. Methods: A total of 17 face-to-face semistructured interviews were conducted with key informants (n=8) and health care providers (n=9) involved in the provision of health care to the Syrian refugee population in Lebanon. Interviews were audio recorded and directly translated and transcribed from Arabic to English. Thematic analysis was conducted. Results: Study participants indicated that varying resources, primarily time and the availability of technologies at primary health care centers, were the main challenges for integrating technologies for the provision of health care services for refugees. This challenge is compounded by refugees being viewed by participants as a mobile population thus making primary health care centers less willing to invest in refugee health technologies. Lastly, participant views regarding the health and technology literacies of refugees varied and that was considered to be a challenge that needs to be addressed for the successful integration of refugee health technologies. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that in the context of integrating technology into the provision of health care for refugees in a low or middle income country such as Lebanon, some barriers for technology integration related to the availability of resources are similar to those found elsewhere. However, we identified participant views of refugees’ health and technology literacies to be a challenge specific to the context of this refugee crisis. These challenges need to be addressed when considering refugee health technologies. This could be done by increasing the visibility of refugee capabilities and configuring refugee health technologies so that they may create spaces in which refugees are empowered within the health care system and can work toward debunking the views discovered in this study

Healthcare media design for low-literate users

Low health literacy has been associated with poor outcomes in health care. Recent research suggests that good healthcare media can help to reduce the literacy barrier and enhance health outcomes. However, the majority of healthcare media are constructed for well-educated users rather than those with low literacy skills. This begs the question of whether or not various healthcare media have the same effect on low-literate users. Immigrant populations are vulnerable to serious health disparities, and language barriers and these may further exacerbate their limited health literacy in accessing health care information. Yet, ways to help low-literate parents to look after their children by applying healthcare media are still at an early stage of development. The aim of this study is to establish useful design strategies for Graphic and Information designers when planning and designing healthcare media for low-literate users. This research was implemented through four experiments, including a focus group interview and questionnaire survey, a pre-post knowledge test, a usability evaluation, and semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed the problems immigrant parents usually encounter in caring for their children’s health. The results demonstrated that the influence of interventions by leaflets and websites on low-literate users is not significantly different. The findings also showed the criteria used by low-literate users to evaluate healthcare media and the visual factors of healthcare media that affect their satisfaction. An assessment checklist related to the design of health educational materials for low-literate users was also listed. This is an interdisciplinary research that integrates Design, Communication and Public Health. It provides a holistic framework for improving health intervention using various methodologies, including development, experiment, observation, comparison, and analysis