ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: As pregnant women are among vulnerable groups susceptible to respiratory infections, healthcare systems in most countries would pay more attention to providing the services required in the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study aims to identify the information needs of pregnant women during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: The research team conducted a qualitative conventional content analysis with an inductive approach to identify the views of 19 experts when working in the field of providing obstetric and midwifery services in Isfahan from April to June 2020. The semi-structured interviews were analyzed using MAXQDA v18. RESULTS: The results showed that the information needs of pregnant women during the Covid-19 epidemic should be set in four areas, including 1) Self-efficacy of pregnant women, 2) Information that provokes sensitivity to the preventive measures, 3) Awareness of the perceived threat, and 4) Awareness of the health system functions in COVID-19 pandemic. CONCLUSION: The study shows that the self-efficacy of pregnant women depends deeply on being informed of the general and specific self-care principles. Besides, sensitivity could be achieved through the increased risk perception and knowledge on the pandemic. However, pregnant mothers should know the potential threats that could pose them at risk of vulnerability. Finally, awareness of the health system functions regarding access to reliable information resources along with provided services at Medical University websites is also recommended.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education set up a 24-h call center, i.e., Center 4030, to mitigate people's worries and anxieties, create composure, increase people's trust, and answer their questions. This qualitative study aimed to identify the challenges of COVID-19-related-information among people in point of experts' views. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This qualitative study was conducted to collect the opinions of experts on the identification of the Information challenges of COVID-19 during March-June 2020. The research population included all health professionals and experts. The sampling method was initially purposive and continued to saturate the data as snowball technique. In this study, 19 participants were interviewed. The data were collected using a semi-structured interview. After collecting the data, the audio files of the interviews were written down to extract their external and internal elements. MAXQDA version 12 software was used to organize qualitative analysis and coding data. RESULTS: The results of this study involved eight themes, i.e., lack of planning, lack of social trust in government, lack of COVID-19-integrated scientific authority in the country, conflicts of interest, lack of integrated information sources, distracting public attention, infodemic, and poor information quality, classified into 16 categories. CONCLUSIONS: The main information challenges that people in Iran faced included the lack of a scientific reference source to access accurate information, the existence of a large volume of information in virtual networks, and a huge volume of statistics from various information channels that caused confusion among people.