Health awareness and lifestyle toward healthcare-seeking behavior among students in Universitas Advent Indonesia

Healthcare-seeking Behavior (HSB), which can also be termed as illness behavior or sick-term behavior, is any action or inaction by individuals who consider themselves having a health problem to seek appropriate remedy.¹ HSB includes health-seeking behavior, the action of individuals to conduct health screening to detect any minor symptoms to get treatment immediately in case there is something needed to be cured.² It will affect health care utilization involving in health care policies and planning for prevention, early diagnosis, and management of health conditions, which will impact to reduction of health care costs, disability, and death from diseases.³ Furthermore, HSB is also contributing to providing data about emerging diseases in certain areas, which can be public-health threat⁴ as prevention for the diseases become epidemic or even pandemic.

Numerous factors can affect individuals’ HSB. Living area, educational level, Internet usage to look for information about disease, perception of own health status, and alternative medicine usage can be some factors that can affect HSB.⁵ These are just some of them and there are still many other factors mentioned by various researchers. Factors that become barriers that cause delays in seeking care of individuals are associated with remarkable morbidity and mortality.⁶ It is more obvious that poor HSB will cause more health problems to individuals or even to society.

As the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia has more than 260 million inhabitants⁷ with countless diversities. Upon various backgrounds of people, Indonesia also has various levels of HSB. In some areas, poor HSB is related to a poor understanding of the disease process about educational level, socio-economic status, occupation, and distance to nearest health facilities.⁸ This problem is a barrier for Indonesia to achieve the third Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)—good health and well-being.

HSB impacts the health level of an area or country. Curiosity emerges to find more significant factors to improve HSB. Health status awareness and lifestyle are suspected to have a role in influencing HSB. Therefore, this research aimed to find the correlation of health status awareness and lifestyle toward HSB.

Participants’ demographic data are presented in Table 1. Most of the participants were females with ages ranging from 18 years old to 20 years old. The biggest sample was in third-year degree and from Accounting major of Economy faculty.

As a result of answers received from the questionnaire, most of the participants were aware of low health risk (92.3%), had a good lifestyle (76.9%), and had moderate HSB (46.2%). The complete data along with the score classification were presented in Table 2.

Finally, the correlation of health awareness and lifestyle toward HSB was analyzed using Spearman’s rho. There was no correlation between variables since all the significance coefficients is α >0.05 (Table 3).

This study aimed to find the new factors that might influence one’s HSB. Nonetheless, this study did not find a correlation between one’s health awareness to their HSB. Health awareness in this study was defined as one’s awareness of their risk in getting sick because of disease in family history. Other studies found a correlation between one’s perception of their health status and behavior of seeking healthcare facilities. ^12–15 However, perception of their health status at the present moment while they had health issues was different compared with only knowing their family history disease. The knowledge of family history disease did not affect one’s behavior to seek help in health care facilities.

Moving to another variable, lifestyle also did not correlate with HSB in this study. It was contradicted with study by Sultana et al.,¹⁶ which found an association between lifestyle and HSB, yet the correlation was not explained in their study. Another study to explore the lifestyle and health care service utilization of Nepali migrants in India found that they had poor lifestyle and poor health care service utilization.¹⁷ It might seem contradicted with this study, but their poor access to health care was due to poverty and discrimination which were similar barriers found in the study conducted in Austria.¹⁸ There was no study concluded that lifestyle could affect one’s HSB, but one study proposed healthy lifestyle promotion might improve health care utilization.¹⁹

As stated earlier, we hypothesized that health awareness and lifestyle might have a correlation to HSB. It was suspected that type 1 error was applied as the outcome of this study as both independent variables turned out to not have any correlation with the dependent variable. This might happen because the utilization of incorrect tool or little sample size. Future researchers could conduct a deeper study in this field by using different questionnaires or gathering more samples. Or, qualitative study could be implemented to cultivate one’s perspective and behavior. In the meantime, we believed that the result was precise since there was no further study contradicting it yet.

Health awareness of one’s risk of acquiring disease in family history was not relevant to their HSB. Lifestyle also did not have an association to increase or decrease one’s HSB. Health awareness and lifestyle were irrelevant compared with their perception of their health status in the moment which would create the urgency or not to visit healthcare facilities.