Introduction
Rural areas are far from having the resources to fully and successfully provide health care to the population, leading to various problems such as accessibility and data protection. As part of their study, Coombs et al. (2022) analyzed the rural community that experiences barriers to obtaining highly skilled medical care. Although the study seems relevant, analyzing this article for its ethicality makes sense because it raises ethical issues.
Discussion
The authors are collecting data in a new way for post-COVID reality, so it can be problematic. The emails and vendors’ use raise questions about how each individual presents the objective data. Providers have a vested interest in increasing the number of services provided to patients because the cost for rural areas may be too high. The study was conducted with Zoom, which a priori raises the issue of privacy and data leakage with recorded conversations. An ethics study of the article should include its relationship to HIPAA, which has clear criteria for patient disclosure. The authors discuss privacy issues in rural areas, but they may have violated this right and lost data due to a lack of protection. This is not acceptable when dealing with health information. Coombs et al. (2022) do not report how many people were interviewed and whether there were only phone calls or video messages. This leads to the potential problem of pressuring interviewees and consequently inducing them to provide some information (even if it is false or incomplete).
This study’s results indicate a correlation between the geography of residence and barriers to care. The objectivity of the data may have affected how complete the study results were and showed unreliable data because participants withheld or concealed information. Issues of confidentiality of information received – the leaking of data, loss of any portions of the interview, and deliberate disclosure of data may have resulted in poor quality data. Pressure on participants and inducing them to give ad hoc answers could change the entire outcome of the interview. For example, participants might not have reported barriers and indicated the integrity of rural health services. The authors themselves might not have released any data, finding it unnecessary and thus reducing the validity of the results.
The validity of the research design is the relevance of how the research is conducted to the methods. The research design consisted of semi-structured interviews, which included Zoom conversations and an assessment of responses to questions that were often adjusted during the call. This methodology is questionable due to the ability of the interviewer not to ask specific questions that are critical to the study. The validity of such a technique would be high if there were third-party supervision of the interview to avoid incompetent questions. It was not reported in the study, so it can be assumed that bias reduces validity, raising doubts about the study’s applicability in other areas. Given the number of fundamental problems in rural areas, the data are ready for testing, but the methodology may need to be tested. Research bias could arise in data collection and interpretation because of the desire for specific results. They could affect the relevance of the methods used because researchers would not choose working techniques and would follow an inefficient or biased path.
Conclusion
Stakeholders include all those who have the potential to benefit from the research. In this case, it may be the providers who are interested in ensuring that their services sell and succeed in different market sectors. Research can be sponsored and modified by those who want to gain public support – politicians to promote campaigns that are harmful to society. One should consider the influence of research institutes, which set budgets for specific medicine sectors to validate their results. Consideration of stakeholders’ views and their pressure may change the direction in which health research is usually implemented.
Reference
Coombs, N. C., Campbell, D. G., & Caringi, J. (2022). A qualitative study of rural healthcare providers’ views of social, cultural, and programmatic barriers to healthcare access. BMC Health Services Research, 22(1). Web.