- Title
- Perspectives of health care professionals’ on delivering mHealth sexual and reproductive health services in rural settings in low-and-middle-income countries: a qualitative systematic review
- Creator
- Laar, Alexander Suuk; Harris, Melissa L.; Shifti, Desalegn Markos; Loxton, Deborah
- Relation
- ARC.DE190101134 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DE190101134
- Relation
- BMC Health Services Research Vol. 22, Issue 1, no. 1141
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-022-08512-2
- Publisher
- BioMed Central (BMC)
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Background: In low to middle income countries (LMICs) with limited health care providers (HCPs) and health infrastructure, digital technologies are rapidly being adopted to help augment service delivery. In this sphere, sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services are increasingly leveraging mobile health (mHealth) technologies to improve service and information provision in rural areas. This systematic review aimed to identify HCPs perspectives on barriers to, and facilitators of, mobile phone based SRH services and information in rural areas of LMICs from current literature. Methods: Searches were conducted using the following databases: Medline, Scopus, PsychINFO, CINAHL and Cochrane Library. Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, twelve full text qualitative studies published in English between January 2000 and December 2020 were included. The methodological quality of papers was assessed by two authors using the critical skills appraisal programme and synthesized using the narrative thematic analysis approach. Results: Positive HCPs experiences surrounding the provision of mHealth based SRH services in LMICs included saving consultation time, ability to shift tasks, reduction in travel costs, easy referrals and follow up on clients, convenience in communicating health information confidentially, and the ability to consult groups of clients remotely rather than face-to-face. Barriers to the provision of mHealth reported by HCPs included lack of technological infrastructure, unreliable networks, limited power, the cost of mobile airtime/data and mobile phones and limited technological literacy or skills. Conclusions: Implementing innovative mHealth based SRH services could bridge a service provision and access gap of SRH information and services in rural areas of LMICs. Despite the advantages of this technology, several challenges associated with delivering mHealth SRH services need to be urgently addressed to enable scale-up and integration of sexual and reproductive mHealth into rural health systems.
- Subject
- health care professionals; mobile phones; Sustainable Development Goals; mHealth; sexual and reproductive health; information and services; low-and middle-income countries; SDG 3; SDG 5; SDG 9; SDG 17
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1484384
- Identifier
- uon:51321
- Identifier
- ISSN:1472-6963
- Rights
- © 2022 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made availablein this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
- Reviewed
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