Knowledge Practices Within the Health Knowledge Systems in Virac, Catanduanes, Philippines

Abstract

To investigate the knowledge practices within the health knowledge systems in Virac, Catanduanes which includes the provincial and municipal health offices, the rural health unit (RHU), and barangay health workers (BHWs), key-informant interviews, focus-group discussion, and survey were conducted. The study, guided by the Knowledge Utilization Theory of Verkasalo and Lappalainen (1998), examined the following practices on health emergency management: knowledge acquisition, knowledge capture and retrieval, and knowledge transfer among health authorities, as well as the knowledge receival, knowledge perception and knowledge utilization among BHWs.

The study found that health authorities adopt various approaches to acquire knowledge on health emergency management. Explicit knowledge is acquired through formal and systematic structures, while tacit knowledge is acquired through open, spontaneous knowledge sharing. To ensure knowledge transfer to barangay health workers (BHWs), health authorities also conduct various activities such as, but not limited to, training, seminars, meetings, and mentoring. The most popular method of knowledge transfer was found to be the use of the group chat system on Facebook Messenger that enables health authorities to directly connect with BHWs without meeting them face-to-face. Knowledge sharing practices were also investigated to check whether the tacit knowledge that BHWs have acquired through experience are being communicated to the provincial and municipal level. The findings showed that BHWs are more inclined to share their knowledge with their barangay nurse/midwife supervisors rather than directly with health authorities at the provincial and municipal levels.

Other challenges are organizational, as well as technological barriers that hinder seamless communication among health workers, thereby impeding the sharing of critical knowledge on health emergency management. Despite these gaps, BHWs still possess and highly utilize the critical knowledge on health emergency management they have received.