Talhouk Reem, Akik Chaza, Araujo-Soares Vera, Ahmad Balsam, Mesmar Sandra, Olivier Patrick, Balaam Madeline, Montague Kyle, Garbett Andrew, Ghattas Hala
School of Design, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom.
Open Lab, Computing, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom.
J Med Internet Res. 2020 Jul 6;22(7):e14283. doi: 10.2196/14283.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
黎巴嫩目前收容了约100万叙利亚难民。将电子健康和移动健康技术整合到为难民和黎巴嫩公民提供初级卫生保健服务中的兴趣与日俱增。
我们旨在更深入地了解在黎巴嫩旷日持久的叙利亚难民危机背景下，技术整合在初级卫生保健服务提供中的潜力。
对参与为黎巴嫩叙利亚难民提供医疗保健服务的关键信息提供者（n = 8）和医疗保健提供者（n = 9）进行了总共17次面对面的半结构化访谈。访谈进行了录音，并直接从阿拉伯语翻译成英语并转录。进行了主题分析。
研究参与者表示，资源各异，主要是时间以及初级卫生保健中心技术的可用性，是为难民提供医疗保健服务而整合技术的主要挑战。参与者将难民视为流动人口，这使得初级卫生保健中心不太愿意投资于难民健康技术，从而使这一挑战更加复杂。最后，参与者对难民健康和技术素养的看法各不相同，这被认为是成功整合难民健康技术需要解决的一个挑战。
我们的研究结果表明，在像黎巴嫩这样的低收入或中等收入国家，将技术整合到为难民提供医疗保健服务的背景下，与资源可用性相关的技术整合障碍与其他地方发现的障碍相似。然而，我们发现参与者对难民健康和技术素养的看法是这场难民危机背景下特有的挑战。在考虑难民健康技术时，需要应对这些挑战。这可以通过提高难民能力的可见性以及配置难民健康技术来实现，以便它们能够创造空间，使难民在医疗保健系统中获得权力，并能够努力消除本研究中发现的看法。
