The last five years have seen a leap in the development of information technology and social media. Seeking health information online has become popular. It has been widely accepted that online health information seeking behavior has a positive impact on health information consumers. Due to its importance, online health information seeking behavior has been investigated from different aspects. However, there is lacking a systematic review that can integrate the findings of the most recent research work in online health information seeking, and provide guidance to governments, health organizations, and social media platforms on how to support and promote this seeking behavior, and improve the services of online health information access and provision. We therefore conduct this systematic review. The Google Scholar database was searched for existing research on online health information seeking behavior between 2016 and 2021 to obtain the most recent findings. Within the 97 papers searched, 20 met our inclusion criteria. Through a systematic review, this paper identifies general behavioral patterns, and influencing factors such as age, gender, income, employment status, literacy (or education) level, country of origin and places of residence, and caregiving role. Facilitators (i.e., the existence of online communities, the privacy feature, real-time interaction, and archived health information format), and barriers (i.e., low health literacy, limited accessibility and information retrieval skills, low reliable, deficient and elusive health information, platform censorship, and lack of misinformation checks) to online health information seeking behavior are also discovered.

In September 2021, Immigration New Zealand (INZ) announced the offer of a one-off residence visa category – the 2021 Resident Visa, to over 165,000 temporary migrant workers and their family members living in the country. The offer was a response to the backlog and growing numbers of applications that INZ was unable to attend to largely because of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on relevant statistical data, news media reports and available academic publications, this research note examines how New Zealand’s sanitization policies during the pandemic affected the lives of temporary migrant workers who hold various work visas.