Health services in Panchkula district Haryana availability accessibility and utilization

Abstract

Health services are one of the main factors that directly influence the health status of a population. Organizational structure of health services is mainly responsible for policy making, planning and designing administrative structures to provide preventive, promotive, and curative health services to all. Apart from the availability of health services, a number of other factors namely quality, spatial distribution and accessibility of health services and their utilization shape the health of the population of a particular area. Accordingly, the present study aims to examine the organizational structure, availability, accessibility and utilization of health services in Panchkula district, Haryana and to identify those factors which serve as impediments in the delivery of health services. The identification of such impeding factors is important to reduce the intra-regional differences and to make health services available and accessible to a larger population, and can prove to be of further help to the policy makers and health planners for developing appropriate policies to deal with various health services related issues in the district. The present study revealed that the primary and secondary levels of health institutions cater to a population much larger than that prescribed by the government norms. Large parts of the north-west, northeast, central belt and eastern regions of the study area are marked by almost complete absence of any type of health centres. The settlements in these areas have extremely poor connectivity of road network and are in dire need of improving the accessibility of health facilities by way of their relocation or expansion and/or opening up of new health facilities. There are significant variations in terms of utilization of different health facilities according to the type of morbidity. newline