Factors Affecting Health Care Seeking Behaviour among Newly Diagnosed HIV Cases in Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Objective: To assess the factors affecting health care seeking behaviour among newly diagnosed Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) cases in Rawalpindi. Methods: An analytical cross sectional study was conducted among 30 newly diagnosed HIV patients in Armed forces institute of transfusion (AFIT) Rawalpindi from 1st Oct to 31 Dec 2019 (within last 3-12 months), after obtaining informed voluntary consent, employing a purposive sampling technique. Confirmed HIV cases belonging to all genders and above 18 years of age were asked to respond to a structured validated questionnaire to collect data. Data was entered and analysed in SPSS version 22. Mean and Standard deviation were calculated for continuous variables. Pearson's correlation test was applied to find out the magnitude of relationship between the health care seeking behaviour scores and the factors affecting it. A p value of <0.05 was taken as significant. Results: All of the patients were on treatment and majority 22 (73.3%) had gone to health care provider in early stages of disease without symptoms. It was evident from the results that health care seeking behaviour of HIV positive individuals had statistically significant association with psychological factors, individual factors, consumer evaluation view point, sociocultural and familial factors, situational factors and marketing factors (p value < 0.05). Conclusion: The simultaneous effect of medical, psychological, emotional, sociocultural and situational and marketing factors was assessed and significant correlations (p value<0.05) were found out between these and health care seeking behaviour.