The HFACT project is delighted to share the latest publication. Bertrand Lefebvre, Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay and Vastav Ratra have published “Who bears the distance cost of public primary healthcare? Hypertension among the elderly in rural India” in the latest issue of Social Science & Medicine.
Hypertension is one of the most prevalent NCDs in the world. Its prevalence is especially high among the elderly, a demographic group on the rise in low and middle income countries. Extant medical literature calls for early detection to prevent aggravation of problems when old. This paper investigates whether diagnosis of hypertension among adults aged 45 and above, is correlated with geographic access to primary public healthcare services, after accounting for a rich set of potentially confounding covariates. Even though public primary facilities are poorly staffed and managed in India, and private care is popular, geographical expansion of public primary facilities can still play an active role in NCDs and public primary health financing should take heed of the need for such expansion.
