Background: Health care seeking behaviour is influenced by the availability and accessibility of health services. Dependent on these determinants and their interactions, health care seeking behaviour has been considered a complex outcome of many factors operating at individual, family, and community levels.
Objective: To find pattern of the health care practices about eye disease.
Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study conducted in the rural field practices area of a tertiary care hospital. The purposive sampling was used to select the study subjects. A total of 160 subjects of age >18 years were studied from 5 villages. From the center of the community, each subsequent household was selected by counting the next 2 or 3 houses in a random direction until the number needed for that community was obtained. Again, the number of households counted and assigned to each community was based on their population size.
Result: The choice of treatment for eye diseases was private (49.4%) followed by over the counter (32.5%) and government (18.1%). Out of those who had government choice, 51.7% had choice of PHC and 34.5% had CHC. The private hospitals (51%) were the main place of treatment for cataract followed by district hospital (14.3%). The main source of information about eye care services was relatives and friends (36.9%) followed by television (30.6%).
Conclusion: There was less utilization of government health facilities in the care seeking of eye diseases among the rural population. Hence, there is a need to strengthen the community to utilize the government health facility through educating the community to have better treatment.
Key words: Eye disease, health care practices, community
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