Abstract

Background: India reported its first case on January 30^th, 2020. As the virulence and infectivity of COVID-19 progresses, the Government of India ordered national lockdown from 24^th March to break the transmission of viruses. More than 100 days of lockdown created an arduous effect in access to healthcare for various reasons.

Aim: To evaluate the utilization of healthcare services during COVID-19 lockdown.

Methods: It is a community based mixed study. Participants were selected by simple random sampling for quantitative method and convenience sampling is used for the qualitative Method. Univariate and thematic analysis was performed.

Results: Among 246 Participants, only 12.2% had access to healthcare facilities. 86% of respondents were screened for COVID-19 before entering the hospital. Nearly 78% of the respondents haven’t followed up their regular health check-ups. About 81.7% worried about their health status and only 17.5% had telephonic and web consultants.

Conclusion: Making proper priority planning and channelization of healthcare facilities for all types the patients and irrespective of the age group can reach out to healthcare foremost during the pandemic crisis. Child and maternal health services, vaccination, immunization, treatment of tuberculosis (DOTS), hemodialysis, and cancer treatment (chemotherapy, radiotherapy) should be handled with proper care and prime concern.

Keywords: COVID-19; Utilization; Health Management; Healthcare

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Citation

Citation: Saravanan Chinnaiyan., et al. “Utilization of Healthcare Services during COVID-19 Lockdown-A Community based Mixed Approach". Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 4.10 (2020): 158-163.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Saravanan Chinnaiyan., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.