Abstract:
Health information literacy plays a critical role in self-management practices among patients living with chronic health conditions. However, there are limited studies on information needs and sources among breast cancer patients in Ghana. The current study therefore investigated the information needs and sources among women living with breast cancer in the treatment and management of breast cancer in Ghana. The study was conducted in two health facilities in Accra, Ghana namely 37 Military Hospital, and Sweden Ghana Medical Centre. A total of 75 breast cancer patients were conveniently selected from the two health facilities for the study. The data was collected with questionnaire using the survey design and analysed descriptively. Findings showed that information needs of the patients centred mainly around treatment and management information and less around preventive information. The patients ranked diagnostic information as their highest needs, followed by physical care information needs, treatment information needs, psychosocial information needs and disease-specific information needs, in that order. Patients with higher education reported higher information need on all the five domains compared to those with lower education. Their main sources of information are biomedical health practitioners, notably doctors, nurses and pharmacists. They indicated that information helped them in coping with both the medical and the psychosocial aspects of their breast cancer condition. Nonetheless, they faced barriers in their information seeking behaviour which ranged from personal challenges to institutional challenges. It is recommended that health information literacy is made an integral component of treatment and management of breast cancer.
