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.