Professional Information Seeking of Emergency Medical Technicians in Bushehr City, Iran

This article aimed to study the main constituents of professional information seeking in organizational context of Emergency Medical Management (EMS) and Disaster Management Center in Bushehr City, Iran. In this study, we tried to investigate the relationship between job duties, professionalism, and information sources in organizational context.
This study was done on the basis of a qualitative method called "interpretive field study". The method of data gathering was interview, observation, and the investigation of Emergency Medical Management documents. For data analysis, at first the concepts was extracted from the interviews and then, they were clustered. Finally, describing the relationship among the set of concepts, a model was presented for information Seeking of Bushehr emergency medical management technicians.
In this model, it became clear that the nature of job of emergency medical management technicians had divided their information seeking to two part: during the processes and after the processes. During the implementation of processes, information seeking was done in the decision-making time which was based on experience and collective consultation. After the implementation of the processes, to answer the information needs, the search for sources began. Method of discerning the information needs, searching for sources (experience, group consultation, official sources, …) during the implementation of process and after that, depended on job training, personal behaviors, and organizational norms which were present in study context.
The emergency medical management authorities should consider the nature of profession and organizational context in information seeking behavior and should utilize from various information seeking pattern to meet the information requirements of emergency medical management technicians.