Health-seeking behavior and associated factors among community in Southern Ethiopia:Community based cross-sectional study guided by Health belief model

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundHealth-seeking behavior is a sequence of actions taken to promote health and prevent disease. Governments’ expenditure to health is being improved in Ethiopia. In contrast, high disease burden and low health service utilization is observed. The low health service utilization could be due to low health-seeking behavior of the community. Thus, this studywas aimed to determine the level of health-seeking behavior and associated factors in Hosanna town, Southern Ethiopia.MethodsWe used communitybased cross-sectional study design among community (n= 443) in Hosanna town. The overall health-seeking behavior of study participants was assessed using the mean score of each of the dimensions (health promotion and disease prevention activities) as a cut-off value. Having a score above the mean on each of the target dimensions was equated with having a high level of health seeking behaviour. STATA 12 soft-ware package (Stata Corporation, College Station, Texas, 77845, USA)was used for descriptive and logistic regression analysis.ResultsAbout eighty five percent of (85.4%) participants had low level of health-seeking behavior. Males were about two folds more likely to have low level of health-seeking behavior than females (AOR: 1.8; CI 1.03–3.42). Widowed participants were about five times more likely to have low health-seeking behavior (AOR: 4.8; CI 2.1–17.1) when compared to married participants. Those participants who are illiterate were about five times more likely to have low health-seeking behavior than who completed higher education (AOR: 4.5; CI 1.16–17.8).ConclusionThe study revealed low health-seeking behavior among the study participants in the study area. This finding suggested the need forurgent interventions to the health literacy packages of Ethiopia to enhance the health seeking behavior of the country.