Special Issue: Meeting the Information Needs of Health Care Providers, Program Managers, and Policy Makers in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

This special issue has full text documents available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/uhcm20/17/sup2

Topics included in the special issue include:

– Empowering people and organizations through information

– Working together to meet the Information needs of Health Care Providers, Program Managers, and Policy Makers in Low- Middle Income Countries

And other interesting articles.

This was a special supplement to the Journal of Health Communication by the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) project (/www.k4health.org). The subsequent blog post by Sarah Harlan from the K4Health team stated that:

“KM [knowledge management] is not just about disseminating information, but actually exploring peoples’ needs, then designing interventions to meet these needs. To date, however, there is not much evidence about specific information needs of different types of health professionals working in low and middle income settings. This supplement provides important results and suggestions that can be used to strengthen knowledge management systems. Beyond that, this research explores different levels of the health system, so we have specific recommendations for how these interventions can be implemented from the global level down to the community level.

We encourage others to review these results and consider the recommendations and implications of the findings as you design and implement your knowledge management programs.

We are offering indefinite open access to these articles, thus supporting free access to health information for health professionals worldwide. ”

There are many links between health communication and knowledge management (for public health) and this supplement provides a useful resource for those working in either field.