RESUMO
India is currently facing shortage of trained health workforce, especially in rural areas. WHO recommends mainstreaming of Complementary & Traditional systems of medicine as an affordable & culturally acceptable way towards achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Despite the Government of India operating AYUSH clinics in PHCs for more than 10 years, we know very little about patients attending these clinics. Exploring the reasons for utilization of AYUSH care is of much value for planning to scale up the integration of AYUSH. The required information on utilization of AYUSH services were obtained through a review of the literature in PubMed databases (including MEDLINE) using the medical subject headings (MeSH) terms: ‘AYUSH’, ‘utilization’, ‘Ayurveda’, ‘Siddha’, ‘Homeopathy’, ‘morbidities’. All such studies which have focussed on profiling of patients who sought care in AYUSH were the individuals who have non–life-threatening chronic diseases or conditions. To improve AYUSH based health care services, it is imperative to understand the acceptability of AYUSH interventions among the general public for the utmost utilization of AYUSH services.
RESUMO
Background: Patient satisfaction is a crucial component of the health care system in today’s competitive modern era. There is a limited literature describing the patient satisfaction on AYUSH care and therefore this study was undertaken to assess the satisfaction about facilities, healthcare providers and treatment among the patients attending selected AYUSH-attached PHCs in rural Puducherry.Methods: A facility based cross-sectional study was conducted among the patients who attended AYUSH clinics at 4 selected PHCs of Puducherry over a period of one year. Personal Interviews using semi-structured pretested proforma was conducted for capturing information on socio-demographic variables, satisfaction regarding the facilities and health care providers. Telephonic interviews were conducted two weeks after the centre-based personal interviews, to assess the patients’ treatment satisfaction levels.Results: Out of the 584 patients interviewed, 71.23% rated as very good/excellent their interaction with the healthcare providers, with regards to satisfaction about the infrastructure facilities, the proportion rating very good/excellent ranged from 64.47% to 93.93% across the different AYUSH PHCs.Conclusions: Overall satisfaction about the quality of services and treatment was good among the patients.