Barriers to Health-Seeking Behavior in Midlife Women

중년여성의 건강추구행위의 장애요인

Health behavior constitutes the single most important factor in an individual's health maintenance program. Pender's health promotion model emphasizes the positive aspects of health-seeking behavior hut omits some negative ones. Although Pender's work does include the concept of barriers, the main focus is upon health habits rather than upon the interaction between the consumer and the health care system. Therefore, since individuals actually do face many barriers in their health-seeking behavior, the present study deals with negative concepts-the barriers to health and healthy behavior. For this reason the expression health-seeking behavior was chosen over health promotion. In conclusion, the results show that barriers to health-seeking behavior are causal factors that could explain and predict the health-seeking behavior of middle life women. Midlife women shows that they have barriers to health-seeking behavior especially in inconvenience, cost, healthcenter site-related problem, relationship, fear. These findings suggest the need to develop a nursing strategy to improve the empowerment of self-determination in middle-aged women. Consequently, a goal of nursing care for middle-aged women should be to help them pursue health care with a greater degree of self-sufficiency.