Abstract
Understanding British Columbia’s opioid-related public interest during the crisis: A Google Trends-based exploration of online health information-seeking behaviour
Highlights
Over the past two decades, opioid-related morbidity and mortality have escalated to a public health emergency (Ayers, Ribisl, & Browstien, 2011)
The aim of this paper is to describe how Google Trends can be used by emergency department personnel to explore important health-related phenomena
Search strategy and data format Search data output from Google Trends is provided as a relative search volume (RSV) that is scaled to the period of highest search volume in the requested time period (RSV 100)
Summary
Over the past two decades, opioid-related morbidity and mortality have escalated to a public health emergency (Ayers, Ribisl, & Browstien, 2011). Canada has the second highest per capita opioid consumption in the world (British Columbia Drug Overdose & Alert Partnership Report, 2014). As of 2016, the opioid-rated death rates in Alberta and British Columbia were more than 14 per 100,000 population, higher than homicides, suicides, breast and colon cancers (Busse, Craigie, Juurlink, Buckley, Wang, Couban, et al 2017). Ontario, Nova Scotia, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon have made naloxone free and accessible to all at pharmacies or community distribution sites (CCENDU, 2016; Fischer, Kurdyak, Goldner, Tyndall, & Rehm, 2016). Healthcare professionals, such as emergency department staff, are searching for information to address the escalating crisis
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