Factors affecting heart attack treatment-seeking delay among African American women

African American women suffer a disproportionate burden of heart attack mortality. Although research has theorized that more lives could be saved if people sought treatment faster, African American women tend to delay seeking treatment from the signs and symptoms of a heart attack. Because research on the causes of delay among this population is scant, the purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore factors and barriers that might contribute to the treatment-seeking behavior of African American women. To gain insight, a nonprobability purposive sampling consisting of 6 African American women who had experienced a heart attack in the past two years was recruited from the Houston, Texas area. Data were collected through one-on-one face-to-face semi-structured interviews using open-ended questions and the data were analyzed, coded, and summarized by the emergent themes and questions. The common sense model and Andersen's behavioral model of health services served as the conceptual framework to explicate the decision-making process of the women by pursuing the constructs of illness representation, symptom perception, lived experiences, culture, and socioeconomic factors. The results showed that barriers to prompt treatment-seeking behavior included the lack of familiarity with the signs of a heart attack while persistent pain was identified as a strong motivator for seeking treatment. The findings suggested that African American women require more education on heart attack symptoms and the need to respond rapidly. The study contributes to social change by offering insight into the causes of heart attack treatment-seeking delay among a population that suffers disparate mortality from this illness, and it could assist in achieving public health's goal to reduce health disparities in this area.