Active and passive information seeking by diabetic patients

Objective (s): Health information seeking behavior describes how the individual search for and obtain health and medical information about health risks, diseases and illnesses, and health promotion activities. Understanding the patient's information seeking behavior can provide the medical and information specialists useful evidence in improving the patient's health. A sample of 362 diabetic patients in Isfahan, Iran was studied. The SPSS version 20, descriptive and analytic statistics are applied in analysis of this work. The Lngo’s health information seeking behavior questionnaire was used to collect data. Descriptive analysis was performed to explore the data. The findings indicatedthat most usable information sources by diabetic patients were physicians (3.12%), television (2.43%), family members (2.32%), news (2.01%), other health care providers (1.38%) and radio (1.19%). Help lines was not indicated as a source of information at all. Differences between passive information seeking (41.68) and active information seeking (39.20) considered statistically significant (p < 0.001). Passive transition of health information on diabetes through most usable information sources seems to be the best way of making these patients alert.