Limitations and scope for further assessment
Quantification of the out-of-pocket expenditure was not done in this
qualitative survey, as the sampling strategy would not permit the
results to be generalized. Further studies are needed to quantify the
costs and assess the trends across hospitals.
This study only involved a few wards in the main tertiary care hospital
in the capital city. The observations of this study need to be compared
with similar studies in other health care institutions, especially
smaller hospitals with minimum laboratory and imaging facilities where
we believe that out-of-pocket costs borne by patients are much higher.