Whitaker Katriina L, Perchyk Tetyana, Kerrison Robert S, Lemanska Agnieszka
Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.
Data Science Department, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, UK.
BMC Glob Public Health. 2024 Jul 18;2(1):49. doi: 10.1186/s44263-024-00082-1.
Tackling inequities in cancer outcomes is a global health priority. One avenue for improving early diagnosis of cancer is to ensure people know when and how to seek help for cancer symptoms and that this knowledge (and behaviour) is equitably distributed across the population. In this perspective piece we highlight the challenges in understanding sociodemographic differences in help-seeking behaviour (for example, how help-seeking is defined / conceptualised and subsequently assessed), as well as challenges with using existing datasets that are now more readily accessible than ever. Addressing these will strengthen methodological approaches to understand inequities in help-seeking and ways to tackle them.
解决癌症治疗结果的不平等问题是全球卫生工作的重点。改善癌症早期诊断的一个途径是确保人们知道何时以及如何就癌症症状寻求帮助，并且这种知识（和行为）在人群中公平分布。在这篇观点文章中，我们强调了在理解寻求帮助行为中的社会人口差异方面的挑战（例如，如何定义/概念化寻求帮助并随后进行评估），以及使用现有数据集所面临的挑战，而现在这些数据集比以往任何时候都更容易获取。解决这些问题将加强理解寻求帮助不平等现象及其应对方法的方法论途径。
