Summary of the Problem

When people think of limited access to health care, the dominant picture that forms in the mind is a scenario where patients want to get medical assistance but there are no health care centers nearby. While this thinking is true, the issue is broader and encompasses many elements. For instance, it has to do with lack of awareness regarding where health facilities are located. It also involves a person’s inability to afford health care services. According to Dassah et al. (2018), the problem is pervasive in rural areas where factors such as lack of knowledge, clinician shortage, and transport barriers make it highly challenging for patients to receive health care services when in need. In most cases, the leading impact is delayed services and near-death experiences as patients look for help.

As a health care provider, it is crucial to live and provide services with quality of care and patient safety as guiding principles. Anything that undermines the achievement of these critical elements deserves a lot of attention and strategies to eliminate it developed promptly. My interest in this topic is based on the principle that limited access to primary health services hampers quality of care, patient safety, and poses a risk to the overall public health goals. Identifying some of the potential intervention approaches implies that I am playing a critical role in solution generation and advancement of evidence-based practice. When it comes to professional experience, I have witnessed instance where patients’ receive delayed services due to access issues. Accordingly, interventions to improve such situations are critically necessary.

Articles’ Selection and Validation

Research articles for health topics should be detailed and cover information about a topic in the most specific way possible. Like it happened to this activity, the search process starts with the formulation of a general topic followed by selection of key terms to get the most appropriate articles related to the topic. The databases I considered for my search include PubMed, CINAHL, and EMBASE. After a thorough search, I found four articles from the Capella Library as annotated in the section that follows (annotated bibliography). Some of the key words that helped to generate the articles include online health information seeking, health care access, health information systems, consumer health information, chronic disease, health information search, health seeking behavior, and rural nursing. Eventually, the articles that settled on major approaches of dealing with limited access to health care such as health care information online and telemedicine were selected.

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Relevance and credibility are critical in the research process. One of the most reliable ways of checking credibility is the use of peer-reviewed articles. In my selection, I primarily concentered on experimental studies. They test hypotheses, making them valid and detailed research articles to make deductions about a health issue. Relevance is rated in terms of publication dates and analysis of a concept directly related to the subject under study. All the four articles met this criterion.

Annotated Bibliography

Bhandari, N. (2014). Seeking health information online: does limited healthcare access matter? Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association: JAMIA (1067-5027), 21 (6), p. 1113. https://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.library.capella.edu/pmc/articles/PMC4215038/

While acknowledging that limited health care access is a global problem, this study examined the link between barriers to health care access and consumers’ health-related information searching on the internet and related elements such as health chat groups and email communication with physicians. The study is based on the idea that consumers facing health care access barriers should consider online health information seeking and communication with physicians as a way of receiving services remotely. This intervention eliminates the need for physical connection as one of the limiting factors, particularly in the rural areas. This article has been considered since it provides a solution to the access problem by showing the need for telehealth. The key finding is that patients unable to receive prompt care or get timely appointments with physicians can participate in health chat groups and email communication with physicians. Overall, it shows the need for technology incorporation in today’s practice to enhance outcomes.

Lee, K., Hoti,