A Study on Socio Demographic Characteristics, Morbidity Pattern and Health Seeking Behaviour of Elderly Aged in Rural Area of Puducherry

Abstract

Background:

Population aging is a global concern and India has a predominant portion of Elder people.  The older adults usually have multiple medical conditions and seeking for the individual care. The knowledge about their health issues would help to provide efficient geriatric care to them.  The present study aimed to assess the morbidity pattern and study the health-seeking behavior of the elderly people.

Materials and Methods

This study was conducted among 622 elderly people of the rural field practicing PHC areas of Sri Lakshmi Narayana Institute of Medical Sciences by simple random sampling. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse the sociodemographic and morbidity variables.

Results

There were 248 (39.9%) males and 374 (60.1%) females and 60% were young old people. Of them, 61.2% were married and living with their spouse and 38.4% were widows/ widowers. The illiteracy was 62.9% among elders and 24.9% had primary education. Almost 91% of them with the family members and 7.9% were living alone. Nearly, 42.3% and 27.8% of them have old aged and widow pension respectively. The female elderly was more dependent on their family. Their income varies between 1000 – 5000 INR. Health complications were high among unemployed elders and they follow allopathic treatment predominately. Chewing betel nut (36.4%) was the most dominate habit among them followed by smoking (12.1%) and alcohol (12.9%). Almost 83.3% were consuming medicines according to doctor’s advice regularly.

Conclusion

The present study showed existence of high morbidity load among elderly and warrant for planning an efficient health care program to take care their health issues..