Evaluate the information seeking behavior of parents with sick children about health and medical issues

Introduction: For parents with sick children, the health care team is not the only source of receiving information, but they try to use different sources. The aim of this study was to evaluate the information seeking behavior of parents regarding health and medical issues. Method: This cross-sectional study was performed on parents of children referred to the clinics of Dr.Sheikh Hospital and Hazrat Rasoul center, Mashhad, Iran, from 2016 to 2018. 550 people filled an indigenous reliable questionnaire (a tool to evaluate parents’ information seeking behavior who have sick children) with Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.934. The exclusion criteria was parental dissatisfaction to attend in the study. The questionnaire consists of six sections including demographic information, needs and motivations about data search, Internet usage, questions about data resources, obstacles to data search, and impact of data. Results: Parents searched various resources to obtain information about child health especially regarding the diagnosis of the child's disease, diet, and child growth and more than half of parents spent less than 2 hours per week for getting information. 31.8% of parents searched the Internet 2 to 5 times a week for health information. The most important reasons for parents to search the Internet were to get more information than what the doctor tell them (53.08%) and look for alternative and traditional treatments (36.9%). According to parents, the most important limitation of the information obtained from the Internet can be its unreliability (63.09%). Conclusion: This study showed that medical staff and the Internet had priority over other sources in obtaining information about the child's illness, however, health care team were more trusted by respondents.