A study on medical behavior in Fiji. On the illness behavior.

Abstract

Study on medical behavior is one of the useful approaches to examine the relationship of individual health-related motivations to utilization of selective health services. And also, Abernathy et al.(1972) emphasised an ability to determine the factors influencing an individual's decision to seek care would be an important contribution to the management of primary care facilities and removal of barriers that deny certain portions of a population access to care. The medical behavior consists of three kinds of definitions; health behavior, illness behavior and sick-role behavior developed by Kasl and Cobb(1966). The health behavior is the activity undertaken by those who believe themselves to be in good health, for the purpose of preventing or detecting disease, in an asymptomalic stage. The illness behavior is the activity undertaken by those who fell ill to define the state of their health and to discover a suitable remedy while the sick-role behavior formulated in sociological conception by T. Parsons, is the activity undertaken by those who consider themselves to be ill and anticipated to have an important social role, and then is related to social factors of the population (Segall A. 1976). The purpose of the present study was to examine the actual situation of health condition, the daily behavior for the restoration of health and the utilization of medical care services at some divisional hospitals in Fiji, from the viewpoint of the illness behavior.