Abstract
Patients seek attention and treatments to various types of diseases and symptoms. Diseases infection and symptoms are often not predictive. Normally, there is a spread and movement of people across the geographical locations, of both the rural and urban communities, in countries including Namibia. As such, healthcare could be needed at any location, and at anytime. There is significant mobility of individuals and groups within a country. Unfortunately, the healthcare services are not always as mobile at the level and speed that individuals and groups does in Namibia. Hence, there is need for the mobility of healthcare services at both primary and secondary healthcare levels, particularly in the developing countries, such as Namibia.
The population of Namibia is scantly spread among its towns and cities. The major towns and cities are situated, in the average of 175km far apart from each other, in the country’s 825, 418km square landscape. The spread necessitates movements of individuals and groups, particularly the old, poor, and nomadic people. Unfortunately, healthcare records in the country are not centralised and virtualised, making accessibility into patients’ records difficult or impossible, from any location. As a result, healthcare service delivering is challenged. This study therefore explored and examined the possibility of mobility of healthcare services to those who live in the country.
The study employed the qualitative research method, within which data was gathered from primary healthcare service providers, using open-ended questionnaires. The Moments of Translation from the perspective of actor network theory (ANT) was used as a lens in the analysis of the data, to examine and understand the power and factors, which influences mobility of healthcare service in Namibia. Categorisation of Patients, Response Time, Understanding the Actors, Actors’ participatory to service delivery, and Actors’ Alliance were found to be the influencing factors in the provision of mobility of healthcare services.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Rygh, E.M., Hjortdahl, P.H.: Continuous and integrated health care services in rural areas. A literature study. The International Electronic Journal of Rural and Remote Health Research, Education Practice and Policy 7(766), 1–10 (2007)
Sander-Granlien, M., Hertzum, M.: Confirmatory factor analysis of service quality dimensions within mobile telephony industry in Ghana. The Electronic Journal Information Systems Evaluation 15(2), 197–227 (2007)
Chaulagai, C.N., Moyo, C.M., Koot, J., Moyo, H.B.: Design and implementation of a health management in Malawi: issues inovation and results, pp. 2–10. Published by Oxford University Press in association with The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2005)
Chang, P.: Modeling the Management of Electronic Health Records in Healthcare Information Systems. In: 2011 International Conference on Cyber-Enabled Distributed Computing and Knowledge Discovery (2011)
Fardoun, H., Cipres, A., Alghazzawi, D., Oadah, M.: KAU e-Health Mobile System. In: 13th International Congress on Human Computer Intercation. ACM (2012)
Cisco.: Mobility solution for healthcare: voice, text, images and information, delivered to the point of care (2007), http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/healthcare/07cs1084-MobForHC_062708.pdf
Latour, B.: Technology is society made durable. In: Law, J. (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, pp. 103–131. Routledge, London (1991)
Iyamu, T.: Underpinning Theories: Order-of-Use in Information Systems Research. Journal of Systems and Information Technology 15(3), 1–13 (2013)
Wickramasinghe, N., Bali, R., Goldberg, S.: Using S’ANT for facilitating superior understanding of key factors in the design of a chronic disease self-management model. Actor Network Theory and Technology Innovation: Advancements and New Concepts Journal, Information Science Reference, Hershey, NY (2011)
Law, J.: Notes on the theory of the Actor Network: ordering, strategy and heterogeneity (1992), http://comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc054jl.html
Tatnall, A., Gilding, A.: Actor-Network theory and Information Systems Research. In: Proceeding of the 10th Australian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS), Wellington, Victoria University of Wellington (1999)
Creswell, K., Worth, A., Sheikh, A.: Actor-Network theory and its role in understanding the implementation of information technology developments in healthcare. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 10–67 (2010)
Braa, J., Hanseth, O., Heywood, A., Mohammed, W., Shawn, B.: Developing information systems in developing country: The flexible standards strategy. MIS Quartely (31), 1–22 (2007)
Hamunyela, S., Iyamu, T.: Readness Assessment model for the deployment of health information systems in the Namibian MoH. In: International Federation for Information Processing, 12th Internation Conference on Social Implications of Computer in Developing Countries, Jamaica (2013)
NPC: Namibia 2011 population and housing census (2012), http://www.npc.gov.na
Rygh, E.M., Hjortdahl, P.: Continuous and integrated health care services in rural areas: a literature study. Rural and Remote Health 7, 766 (2007)
MoHSS.: Integrated healthcare delivery the challenge and implementations (2012), http://www.healthnet.org.na/documents.html
Narang, J.K.: Quality of Healthcare Services in Rural India: The User Perspective. VIKALPA, 51–60 (2011)
Istepanian, R.J.: Guest Editorial Introduction to the Specialon M-Health: Beyond Seamless Mobility and Global Wireless Health-Care Connectivity. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 405–414 (2004)
Yin, R.K.: Case Study Research Design and Methods, 3rd edn. Sage Publications, UK (2003)
Hovorka, D.S., Lee, A.S.: Reframing Interpretivism and Positivism as Understanding and Explanation: Consequences for Information Systems Research. In: International Conference on Information Systems, Paper 188 (2010)
Uden, L., Francis, J.: Service Innovation using Actor Network theory. Actor Network Theory and Technology Innovation: Advancements and New Concepts Journal, Information Science Reference, Hershey, NY (2011)
Armbrust, M., et al.: A view of Cloud Computing. Communications of the ACM 53(4), 50–58 (2010)
Haeberlen, A.: Practical Robust Localization over Large-Scale 802.11 Wireless Networks. In: Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (2004)
Iyamu, T., Tatnull, A.: The impact of netwrork of actors on the infomation technology. Actor Network Theory and Technology Innovation: Advancements and New Concepts Journal, Information Science Reference, Hershey, NY (2011)
Dwyer, C., Hiltz, S., Passerini, K.: Trust and privacy concern within social networking sites: A comparison of Facebook and MySpace. In: The Proceedings of the Thirteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Iyamu, T., Hamunyela, S., Mkhomazi, S.S. (2014). Rethinking the Roles of Actors in the Mobility of Healthcare Services. In: Bergvall-Kåreborn, B., Nielsen, P.A. (eds) Creating Value for All Through IT. TDIT 2014. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 429. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43459-8_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43459-8_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-43458-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-43459-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)