Information needs of public health practitioners: a review of the literature

Abstract

Objective: To review published literature covering the information needs of public health practitioners and papers highlighting gaps and potential solutions in order to summarise what is already known about this population and models tested to support them. Methods: The search strategy included bibliographic databases LISTA, LISA, PubMed and Web of Knowledge. The results of this literature review were used to create two tables displaying published literature. Findings: The literature highlighted that some research has taken place into different public health subgroups with consistent findings. Gaps in information provision have also been identified by looking at the information services provided. Conclusion: There is a need for further research into information needs in subgroups of public health practitioners as this group is diverse, has different needs and needs varying information. Models of informatics that can support public health must be developed and published so that the public health information community can share experiences and solutions and begin to build an evidence-base to produce superior information systems for the goal of a healthier society.Keywords: access to information, information literacy, information management, information networks, information systems, information-seeking behaviour, medical informatics, public health Key Messages• Information specialists working to support public health practitioners must promote the use of, and enable access to, all types of public health information including evidence and grey literature.• The lack of searchable databases for public health grey literature is a barrier to accessing this literature by public health practitioners. Public health information specialists should work to create a central repository of grey literature.• Information specialists should work together to develop a recognised system of classification for public health which can be widely used to index both research and unpublished literature.• Information specialists need to continue efforts to provide information literacy and search skills education for public health practitioners, to help these practitioners to recognise their information needs and provide them with the skills to act on those needs.

Evidence-based information needs of public health workers: a systematized review

“…This review replicates the findings of previous studies that found access, funding, and time to be major barriers to using evidence-based information [15, 16]. Additionally, several studies in this review highlighted external factors like political climate, organizational culture, and funding mandates [10, 30, 39, 45, 47, 50].…”

“…Although literature reviews on this topic exist [15, 16], none have employed systematic search strategies or critical appraisal. The main aim of this study is to assess information needs of public health workers based on a review of the literature using a systematic search strategy.…”

Visualization and analytics tools for infectious disease epidemiology: A systematic review

“…Public health professionals need timely access to current data from reliable, high quality sources [9, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62]. Furthermore, public health professionals need synthesized and collated data on relevant information such as best practices, effective prevention strategies or interventions, and evidence-based research, to name a few [9, 55, 59, 61, 63]. Public health professionals gather information from colleagues, literature and health departments [55, 57, 58, 62, 64].…”

“…Public health professionals gather information from colleagues, literature and health departments [55, 57, 58, 62, 64]. However, multiple studies suggested that public health professionals are still often unaware of available information resources, and emphasized collaboration to improve search outcomes [56, 60, 63, 65]. Additional challenges associated with meeting information needs include external barriers (e.g.…”

Informing Evidence Based Decisions: Usage Statistics for Online Journal Databases

“…Barr-Walker, 2017;Ford & Korjonen, 2012), health care providers (e.g., Younger, 2010) or of academic researchers (e.g., Haglund & Olsson, 2008;Niu et al 2010 Figure 1.…”