. Golrokh Atighechian; . Fatemeh Rezaei; . Nahid Tavakoli; . Mitra Abarghoian
Volume 11, Issue 6 , July 2021, , Pages 1-9
Abstract
BACKGROUND: At the beginning of the COVID‑19 pandemic, the Iranian Ministry of Health andMedical Education set up a 24‑h call center, i.e., Center 4030, to mitigate people’s ...
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BACKGROUND: At the beginning of the COVID‑19 pandemic, the Iranian Ministry of Health andMedical Education set up a 24‑h call center, i.e., Center 4030, to mitigate people’s worries andanxieties, create composure, increase people’s trust, and answer their questions. This qualitativestudy aimed to identify the challenges of COVID‑19‑related‑information among people in point ofexperts’ views.MATERIALS AND METHODS: This qualitative study was conducted to collect the opinions of expertson the identification of the Information challenges of COVID‑19 during March–June 2020. Theresearch population included all health professionals and experts. The sampling method was initiallypurposive and continued to saturate the data as snowball technique. In this study, 19 participantswere interviewed. The data were collected using a semi‑structured interview. After collecting the data,the audio files of the interviews were written down to extract their external and internal elements.MAXQDA version 12 software was used to organize qualitative analysis and coding data.RESULTS: The results of this study involved eight themes, i.e., lack of planning, lack of social trustin government, lack of COVID‑19‑integrated scientific authority in the country, conflicts of interest,lack of integrated information sources, distracting public attention, infodemic, and poor informationquality, classified into 16 categories.CONCLUSIONS: The main information challenges that people in Iran faced included the lack ofa scientific reference source to access accurate information, the existence of a large volume ofinformation in virtual networks, and a huge volume of statistics from various information channelsthat caused confusion among people.
