Health Personnel’s Perception On The Use Of Social Media In Healthcare Delivery System In Rural and Urban Communities of Oyo State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study examined health personnel’s perception on the use of social media in healthcare delivery system in rural and urban communities of Oyo state, Nigeria. Randomly, 2 Local Government Area (LGA) each were selected from rural and urban LGA that represents 12% of LGA in the state, these are Ibarapa East, Iseyin, Ibadan North and Ogbomosho North.  Purposively, medical centres were sampled based on the concentration of health practitioners in selected health centres. A total of three medical centres each from Ibarapa East and Iseyin, while three medical centres were selected from Ibadan North and Ogbomoso North. In all, 112 health personnel were used from the 124 personnel sampled. A good number of the respondents were below 50 years, data obtained indicated that there were more female medical personnel (66.1%) than male (33.9%). All the respondents had more than one year of working experience with 33.9% of them having less than five years work experience. Majority (58.9%) are aware of social media and had the mean score of 16.70 ± 3.19.  Respondents have a high knowledge of social media (13.3± 2.67), favourably disposed to the use of social media in healthcare delivery (84.34±13.20). There exist a significant relationship between respondents’ knowledge (r = 0.267; p<0.05) and the perception of health personnel on the use of social media for health care delivery, while there is no significant difference ((F=0.956; p>0.05) in respondents’ perception of health personnel on the use of social media for health care delivery across the medical personnel interviewed. Social media encourages youth participation and consequently can promote energies of rural youths for innovative effort to use social media to bring healthcare to rural communities.

Keywords: Social Media, Health personnel, Perception, Rural and Urban Communities