Mobile phones and patient referral in Thai rural healthcare: a structuration view

ABSTRACT

This study employs a structuration view to examine how the use of mobile phones by healthcare staff affected, changed, or modified the existing patient referral system in rural Thailand. Findings from the interviews (n = 31) indicate that healthcare staff used their personal mobile phones for patient referral because they could quickly reach specific personal contacts in the hospitals and provide nuanced contextual information that was not possible to communicate via the formal paper-based communication system. The practices capture the nascent quasi-institutionalization of mobile-assisted referrals, and provide insights into how existing organizational rules, cultural, norms, resources, and social relationships shape, and are likely to be shaped by mobile communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile phone
• rural healthcare
• structuration
• social relationships
• mhealth
• referral

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rich Ling (Ph.D. University of Colorado, sociology) is the Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He also works with Telenor, the Norwegian Telecommunication Operator. For the past two decades, Ling has studied the social consequences of mobile communication. He has written or edited 12 books and over 100 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. He is the author of The mobile connection (Morgan Kaufmann, 2004), New Tech, New Ties (MIT, 2008) and Taken for grantedness (MIT, 2012). He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, a founding co-editor of Mobile Media and Communication (Sage) and the Oxford University Press Series Studies in Mobile Communication. He was recently named a fellow of the International Communication Association [email: [email protected]].

Thanomwong Poorisat is a research fellow at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she also received her Bachelor's, Master's, and Ph.D. degree in Communication Her current research focuses on health communication in various contexts and countries. Her work seeks to identify intended as well as unintended effects of health campaigns, policies, and interventions, and the mechanism underlying the success and failure of each program [email: [email protected]].

Arul Chib (Ph.D. University of Southern California) is Associate Professor at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, and Director of the SIRCA program. Dr. Chib investigates the impact of mobile phones in healthcare (mHealth) and in transnational migration issues, and is particularly interested in intersects of marginalization. He has edited three books and published over 75 research articles and book chapters. Dr. Chib won the 2011 Prosper.NET-Scopus Award for the use of ICTs for sustainable development, accompanied by a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 The names of the informants have been changed to anonymize the material.

Additional information

Funding

The study was supported by the SIRCA Graduate Award (Research), which was presented by the Singapore Internet Research Center.