Comparison Of Health-seeking Behaviour Between Urban And Rural Malay Population Of Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia

There is a growing interest on research related to health-seeking behaviours.
However, there are minimal studies in Malaysia which focus on this issue.
This paper aimed to determine the health-seeking behaviours among the
Malay population and its association based on the localities of the urban and
rural population. To achieve this purpose, a cross-sectional survey was conducted using face-to-face interview method. A total of 480 respondents participated in this survey with the majority (57.7%) of them were from a rural
area. Among all the subjects, 4.9% and 5.4% of urban and rural participants respectively, did not seek treatment when they were sick. The reasons
being are they chose to ignore the pain (80%), time-consumption (8%), and
they do not believe in modern treatments (8%). A higher number of rural
participants chose public healthcare facilities compared to urban (82.3% vs
72.6%, p<0.001), whereas a higher number of urban participants chose private healthcare facilities in contrast to rural participants (25.3% vs 16.4%,
p<0.001). For participants with chronic diseases, 5.3% did not go for followup, 91.2% rely on healthcare staffs for information on the diseases, and 18.9%
took traditional or supplementary medicine. Majority of the participants are
in agreement that the accessibility to public healthcare facilities in terms of
distance, transportation and operational time, as well as the services to get
treatments, were good. Overall, majority of the respondents prefer to seek
treatments from public healthcare facilities followed by private facilities and
pharmacies. However, there is a small number of participants who did not
seek for treatments, including those with chronic diseases. Further studies
shall be conducted to explore the barriers to seeking treatments in this population.