Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Nov 04, 2021)
Date Submitted: Sep 11, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Information-Seeking Behavior of Community Pharmacists in Japan during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Ecological Study Based on Indexing Web Page Access
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an infodemic, and the need for rapid and accurate information seeking and providing has become an urgent issue. Community pharmacies play an important role in supporting the health of residents as “Communicators”. In the early stages of the pandemic in Japan, there was a lack of information in pharmacies about infection control written in Japanese. Therefore, the Pharmacy Informatics Group (Kyoto, Japan) published a Japanese-language web page to disseminate this information. Nevertheless, the information-seeking behavior of Japanese pharmacists during disasters such as COVID-19 has not been fully evaluated.
Objective:
This study aims to evaluate the information-seeking behavior of community pharmacists during the COVID-19 pandemic, with relation to COVID-19 infections and deaths within their local prefecture.
Methods:
An ecological study comparing the number of accesses to the web page established by the Pharmacy Informatics Group and the number of infections and deaths in 47 prefectures was conducted. Total number of accesses (TA), total number of infections (TI) per 100,000 population, total number of deaths (TD) per 100,000 population, and number of pharmacists per 100,000 population for the 47 prefectures during the target period (April 6 to September 30, 2020) were calculated using the access information on the web page and public information.
Results:
In Japan, during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, TA was 226,130 (10,984–138,898), TI was 78,761 (1,738–31,857), and TD was 1,470 (39–436). The correlation between TA and TI per 100,000 population in 47 prefectures was r=.72 (95% CI: .55–.83, P<.001), and between TA and TD per 100,000 population in 47 prefectures was r=.44 (95% CI: .17–.65, P=.002).
Conclusions:
Our findings indicate that information-seeking behavior of community pharmacists was positively correlated with infection status within the community.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.