Who comes to us?

It has been some time since someone requested me to look at who accesses services in our hospital and we wanted to look at whether it was the deserving people who had the RSBY (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana) Smart Card with them. 

One of the major problems with all welfare schemes is that many a time it is middle class who corner away most of the benefits which are supposed to go down to the masses who have are worse off than them. 

Below are the preliminary results. 

The socio-economic score we used was the Uday Pareekh scale for rural areas. The duration of the study was 5 days somewhere in the first half of December. And we looked at all patients who came to general outpatient department on those 5 days. The number of patients who accessed outpatient during those 5 days were very less because of the severe cold. 

So, the first question .. .. .. We at NJH, consider ourselves to exist for the welfare of the most marginalised and backward community groups of our region. So, who are the people who access our services?

Socio-economic category	Nos of patients	Percentage of total
Lower class	46	24%
Lower middle class	115	61%
Middle class	27	14%
Upper middle class	2	1%
TOTAL	190	100%

The second question was about the number of people in each socio-economic category who possessed a RSBY Smart Card . . . a major welfare initiative by the Government of India for the poor. And below is the result. 

Socio-economic category	Number of patients	Number of patients with RSBY Card	Percentage of patients with RSBY Smart Card
Lower class	46	16	35%
Lower middle class	115	22	19%
Middle class	27	7	26%
Upper middle class	2	0	0%

So, there you are . . . It is the middle class who garner quite a lot of the benefits and more needs to be done to ensure that the benefits seep down to the more poor among our countrymen . . . However, I feel that 35% of the lower class possessing the RSBY Card is quite an achievement for the government. 

One can say that the sample size is small and it was done during a very lean season. I wish I could do the study during a very busy outpatient like what we have nowadays. I've a hunch that the results are not going to be much different. 

Comments are invited .. .. ..

(Acknowledgement: Special thanks to George Savio Chalam who helped us with the survey and part of data entry and Ms Pheba Zachariah who did the other half of the data entry and rechecked data)