However, most Arab governments have not placed sufficient public health strategies to tackle such conditions and in general have a weak implementation of such strategies. Non-communicable diseases (NCD) have increased in the Arab world in the recent decades. However, the effectiveness of public health initiatives in such countries can be difficult to quantify without bespoke, large scale data collection, which is costly, time consuming and often limited in terms of geographical scope. Such campaigns are undertaken in the Arabian Peninsula (consisting of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen). They serve the purpose of raising awareness of health conditions among the general public, aiming to empower them with knowledge that may be beneficial for the management and prevention of these conditions. GPHD have been defined as “brief exposure, high visibility programmes designed to stimulate thinking and discussion of certain health risks and issues by large numbers of people”. Global Public Health Days (GPHD) are awareness events for a wide range of health conditions.
GPHD appears to be effective in some countries while further research is needed to investigate the reason of its limitations. Statistical analysis, undertaken using joinpoint regression software, showed that GPHD have significant changes for Saudi Arabia (Diabetes, Mental Health and Heart day) and UAE (Mental Health day) but were short-lived with a fall in RSV of up to 80% after peak interest. Relative Search Volume (RSV) was extracted for the aforementioned countries from 28 days before the GPHD and 7 days afterwards. Our objective was to use Google Trends to assess the impact of four GPHD (World Heart Day, World Mental Health Day, World Diabetes Day and World Hypertension Day) on online health information-seeking behaviour (OHISB), 4 weeks before and a week after the GPHD, across six countries of the Arabian Peninsula (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates). Google Trends is a publicly available tool that allows the user to view the popularity of a searched keyword during a specified time period and across a predetermined region. Global Public Health Days (GPHD) are public health interventions which serve to improve public awareness of specific health conditions.
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