The general health-seeking behavior has been well described in different populations. However, how different symptoms have driven health-seeking behavior was less explored. From the patient’s perspective, health-seeking behavior tends to be responsive to discomfort or symptoms rather than the type of diseases which is unknown before medical consultation, hence symptom-specific behavior may more realistically reflect responses from the public which is subsequently captured by syndromic surveillance. In Hong Kong, sentinel surveillance of common diseases, such as ILI and acute diarrhoeal diseases, consists of general practitioners (GP), general outpatient clinics (GOPC) and Chinese medicine practitioners (CMP). These existing sources of syndromic surveillance data are affected by the choice of health services and health seeking behavior and hence may over- or under-represent actual disease burden. By understanding health-seeking behavior at different times of the year, we could estimate the disease burden in the population, and population subgroup from multiple surveillance data.
Objective
This study described health-seeking behavior of the general population specific to different symptoms, at different times of the year. This information allows the estimation of population disease burden over the year using sentinel surveillance data. We will use influenza-like illness (ILI) as an example.