Health Information Needs of Immigrant Patients with Cancer in Iran

Information has an important role in supporting and increasing knowledge of people, especially particular group such as immigrants. This study was conducted to investigate the health information needs and its challenges of the Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani immigrants in Iran. This survey-analytic study was carried out among 69 immigrants with cancer who were hospitalized in Tehran, Mashhad, Kerman, Zahedan and Ahvaz Hospitals. We used a self-designed questionnaire to collect data and use Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis Test and SPSS software was used to analyze data. There was no significant difference between health information needs of cancer patients and their gender, age, marital status, level of education, job, lifestyle and rural-urban residency. We also founded that the most information need of participants was about "access to healthy living" (4.19) and the main obstacle to access to needed information needs was "lack of enough knowledge in using the health information in both electronic and printed resources" (4.01). It is inevitable to pay enough attention to the health information needs of cancer patients, because of their cultural and social differences with the Iranian Society. Therefore, identifying their health information needs in the course of treatment and providing appropriate information by information scientists and doctors is helpful to decrease their mental stress and increase their mental security which would improve their well-being and accelerate their recovery from disease.