Healthcare seeking behaviour during the COVID 19 lockdown in an urbanized village in Delhi: A cross-sectional study

Abstract

Introduction: In response to the COVID pandemic, the government of India announced a country-wide lockdown on 25th March,2020, extended till 31st May,2020. Fear in the community about accessing non-COVID services would have affected healthcare-seeking behaviour.
Methodology: UHTC(Urban Health Training Center),Aliganj caters to 6000 population, in an urbanized village of South Delhi. We used a pre-designed, semi-structured questionnaire on sociodemographic details and health-seeking behaviour on adults who regularly sought health care from UHTC. We used systematic random sampling to select patients attending UHTC during November-December 2020 and analysed the data in SPSS.
Results: Of 218 patients,198 required consultations during the lockdown. 116(58.5%) accessed an alternate government health facility,58(29.2%) accessed a private clinic, while 2(1%) opted for teleconsultation. 113 patients reported to have not taken the medication previously prescribed from UHTC. Reasons cited were unavailability of medicines in pharmacies[49(43.3%)], drugs were expensive[47(41.2%)] and migration to the village where the medicine was unavailable[17(15%)].
Conclusions: More than one-fourth of the study population visited private clinics during the lockdown for consultations. 44.3% of the patients bought medicines from private pharmacies resulting in out-of-pocket expenditure. There was low uptake of telemedicine services. Unavailability and cost were barriers to taking prescribed medication during the COVID 19 lockdown.