The Impact of the COVID-19 Outbreak on Unmet Health Care Needs in Istanbul

COVID-19 pandemic caused significant barriers to maintain health services. The aim of this study is to reveal factors of unmet needs during the COVID-19 pandemic as compared to pre-COVID-19 era in Istanbul, the trade hub of Turkey and Europe’s biggest city. As our study is the first questing Istanbul experience, we estimate the frequencies and determinants of unmet healthcare need among +15 population using TurkStat’s Income and Living Conditions Survey Data via Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) during the pandemic in 2021 with respect to pre-COVID-19 period of 2019. The frequency of the Istanbulers who had unmet healthcare needs increased more than 1.5 time during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the most prominent barriers were late appointment dates and financial difficulty both before and during the pandemic. But during the COVID-19, the share of Istanbulers complaining to late appointment date rises to almost 53% while financial difficulty decreases to 8.14%.  According to our findings, women and those having any chronic disease become significantly more likely to have unmet health needs during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic period. Indeed, the ones belonging to the lowest income group and having lower level perceived health were disadvantaged with higher change of unmet needs both prior to and during the pandemic. As unmet healthcare needs due to COVID-19 jeopardizing the healthcare systems, it is important to comprehend the causes of unmet healthcare demands during infectious disease outbreaks in order to prioritize the right policies and protection strategies for the most vulnerable ones.