RESULTS
In this study, a convenient sample of Healthcare workers from primary health care centers were selected (n=109). The responders were physicians (n=42) representing 38.5% of the studied sample. The age ranged between 26 and 45 years with a mean of 31.12 ± 3.723 years and experience of 1 to 11 years.
The physicians were subdivided into five specialties where family physicians were the majority (n=24, 57.1% of the physicians) followed by pediatricians (n=8, 19.0%) and the rest were internal medicine doctors, gynecologists and family planning doctors. The nurses (n=27) represented 24.8% of the sample, of age between 20 to 34 years with a mean of 25.56 ± 3.320 and experience ranged between 2 and 11 years with, dentists (n=12), pharmacists (n= 16) and physical therapists (n=12) representing 11%, 14.7% and 11% of the sample respectively with age ranged between 23 and 34 years and experience of 1 year to 12 years duration.
In total, all the 109 HCWs completed the questionnaire in the first phase. The majority of the respondents were females (n=99, 90.8%), and 10 responders were males (9.2%). Only 31.2% of HCWs were registered for post-graduate studies, the majority registered for diploma 20.2% and 11% for masters. Inferential statistics showed that there was association between level of education and awareness of healthcare workers of telehealth, 66.7% of those with master’s degree were aware of telehealth while only 31.8% of those with diploma were aware and the difference was statistically significant as P=.038.
In another aspect 49.1% of physicians were aware of telehealth while only 29.6% of nurses were aware of telehealth and the difference was statistically significant as P=0.048. At the same time there was no association between awareness and different specialties of physicians as P=.531. The total score was highest among physicians 141.15± 22.941 while it was lowest among pharmacist, 114.10± 22.283 and in between among other professions, the difference was statistically significant as P=0.0004 through ANOVA. There was no statistical significance difference between the total scores of physicians with different specialties as P=0.707.
Table 1 shows that the scores of different domains increased after application of the program and the mean differences are statistically significant in different domains as P˂0.05.
Table 2 shows that the difference between different groups of jobs concerning health care workers satisfaction to implement Tele-health is statistically significant as P˂0.05.
The total number of Healthcare workers was 109 HCWs, 54 (49.5%) HCWs are aware of telehealth and 55 (50.5%) HCWs are not aware of telehealth. Table 3 shows that age and experience in months were the only adjusted predictive factors for awareness about telehealth.