"Background: According to Census 2011 nearly 104 million elderly per-sons in India.6 The 2011 census re-veals that Karnataka has 7.9% elder-ly population. Health seeking be-haviours are influenced by a variety of factors among elderly like socio-economic conditions, age, social sta-tus of the person, gender, authority of the elderly within the family.
The objective of the study was to as-sess the health seeking behaviour among elderly in rural and urban field practice areas of Shimoga insti-tute of medical sciences, shimoga
Methods: A community-based cross-sectional study was conduct-ed in the urban and rural areas of Shimoga district; the study period was from August 2017 to January 2018. Provisional diagnosis of dis-eases of elderly was made based on reported symptoms, clinical evalua-tion by investigators. The data was collected through predesigned and pretested personal interviews by house-to-house visits after taking informed consent from the partici-pants. The data collected were com-piled and entered into Microsoft Ex-cel software. For statistical analysis, SPSS version 21 was used.
Results: Health seeking behaviors are influenced by a variety of factors among elderly like socioeconomic conditions, age, social status of the person, gender, authority of the el-derly within the family. Type of health facility preferred by elderly was government hospital (94.3%) in rural and private hospitals in urban (58.1%)
Conclusion: Health and treatment seeking behaviour among elderly is very poor, which needs a awareness creation and creating easy accessi-bility of health services. It needs im-plementation of programs at grass root level."
Key words: health seeking, elderly, morbidity.
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