Target Audience's Awareness and Perspectives about the Guideline on Dissemination of Health Research Results and Innovations

Media act as the most significant tool in dissemination of health news. The Health Ministry’s guideline on public dissemination of results can be considered the first controlling policy in disseminating health news in the country. This study examines the level of awareness and perspectives of health journalists, researchers and health research managers on the aforementioned guideline.

The study was conducted through both qualitative and quantitative methods. In the qualitative section, opinions of 23 individuals including researchers, health journalists and research centers’ authorities were gathered through six in-depth interviews and four focus group discussions. The content of the interviews were analyzed through thematic analysis with Open code software. In the qualitative section, as a quick complementary study, the guideline’s publicizing was reviewed by questioning the medical universities’ public relations officers (41 universities) and researchers (24 individuals) whose research results had been disseminated in mass media in the past one month.

In the qualitative section, the guideline was examined for three domains of publicizing, content, and executive assurance. Most interviewees were unaware of the guideline. Concerning the content, not being comprehensive, and incompleteness of the guideline’s items, lack of clarity of the items, absence of specification of target audiences, and lack of executive assurance were mentioned. In the quantitative section, 28 (71.8%) medical universities’ public relations officers and 21 (87.5%) researchers were unaware of the guideline.

The importance of public dissemination of health research and innovation findings grows accordingly with the increased production of science in the country. Implementing research governance and existence of compulsory guidelines seems necessary in this respect. The current guideline’s content is defective, and this matter impedes its executive assurance. Therefore, we suggest revising it with the help of relevant stakeholders and experts (lawmakers, journalists, politicians, scientists, etc).