Symptom Response

Three primary responses to noticing symptoms

1. Ignoring symptoms, 2. Seeking advice from others, and 3. Seeking professional medical care.

Factors that promote ignoring symptoms

Mild, ambiguous, or inconvenient sensations, which frequently result in delay behaviour.

Circumstances that prompt seeking advice from others

When sensations are painful, disruptive to daily life, observable by peers, unusual, or culturally acceptable to discuss.

Four categories of barriers to seeking professional care

Practical, psychological, social, and cultural barriers.

Delay Behaviour Model (Safer et al., 1979)

A psychological framework proposing that patient delay occurs across three sequential stages: appraisal, illness, and utilisation.

Appraisal delay

The time elapsed before interpreting bodily changes as an actual medical problem; influenced by symptom ambiguity, competing life demands, low attention to internal cues, and normalisation.

Illness delay

The time between acknowledging an illness and making the decision to seek care; affected by perceived severity, fear of diagnosis, social norms, and peer advice.

Utilisation delay

The time from deciding to seek care to actually accessing services; driven by availability of time, financial cost, geographic access, work constraints, and psychological factors.

Effect of lay consultation on medical delay

It can either decrease or increase delay time, depending on whether the advice encourages or discourages professional evaluation.

Factors increasing utilisation delay in men (Mahalik et al., 2018)

Adherence to masculine social norms, managing perceived threat, gendered beliefs about resilience, work obligations, and practical obstacles.