Residents' willingness and awareness to participate in internet+nursing service in China: A meta-analysis

Background: The internet + nursing service is an important initiative for implementing the strategy of healthy China and actively responding to the aging of the population. However, the current literature on residents' awareness and willingness to participate is insufficient and presents large variations and limitations. Therefore, this study aims to systematically evaluate the awareness and willingness of Chinese residents to participate in internet + nursing service to comprehensively understand the level of awareness and acceptance of this emerging service model among Chinese residents and to provide strong support for relevant policy formulation and service optimization.

Methods: The PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, CNKI, WanFang Data, SinoMed, and VIP databases were electronically searched to collect cross-sectional studies related to the awareness and willingness of Chinese residents to participate in internet + nursing service from inception to January 2024. Two reviewers independently screened the literature, extracted the data, and assessed the risk of bias of the included studies.

Results: A total of 27 cross-sectional studies involving 11,761 subjects were included. The results of the meta-analysis showed that the percentage of Chinese residents willing to participate in internet + nursing service was 76.3% (95% CI [71.2%, 81.3%]). The results of the subgroup analysis showed that residents who lived in Western regions (82.1%), had employee medical insurance (85.9%), were suffering from other diseases (89.2%), were under the age of 60 (87.8%), were not married (78.9%), and had an undergraduate degree or above (85.5%) had a relatively high willingness to participate in internet + nursing service. The rate of awareness of internet + nursing service among Chinese residents was 48.6% (95% CI [24.1%, 73.2%]), which shows a downwards trend over time (67.4% in 2019, 56.1% in 2020, and 45.1% in 2021).

Conclusion: The willingness to participate in internet + nursing service among Chinese residents is high, but the awareness rate is low. It is necessary to improve the awareness and willingness of Chinese residents to use internet + nursing service through various channels and aspects of publicity and promotion to achieve the goal of innovating the health service model, accurately connecting with the diverse health needs of people, and actively responding to the aging population.