Challenges for Cancer Patients Seeking Medical Care During COVID-19 Lockdown in India: A Narrative Review

Delivering healthcare services to cancer patients during COVID-19 lockdown posed several challenges; however, lack of reporting and concerned reviews made it imperative to understand the nuance of narratives among cancer patients across country. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe effect on the entirety among cancer patients in the continuum of care. In this regard, this article aims to investigate the challenges and hard times faced by cancer patients due to mismanagement and lack of health system planning during COVID-19 lockdown in India. A total of 46 newspaper articles with distinct cases of patients suffering from different types of cancer were collected between 24 March 2020 and July 2020 lockdowns in India. We analyse the online news reports and articles of cancer patients facing regular services and treatment challenges during the country’s lockdown following an inductive approach. We conducted the content analysis that chose online news articles across states/union territories, leading to the creation of a conceptual diagram for our article. From all the articles, most articles reported challenges like poor governance of cancer patients (63%) and lack of timely treatment (37%) from the supply-side issues, whereas from the demand-side constraints, such as fear of transmission (10%), financial issues (10%) and accommodation problems (5%), were reported. The broad thematic categories that evolved from our content analysis are patient-centred related factors, healthcare management-related factors or supply-side factors and detrimental impacts of lockdown with the poor governance of cancer patients. Further, the findings revealed through different sets of narratives that involved a range of multiple factors such as service interruption, delays and altered modes of screening, diagnosis and treatment as well as follow-up and palliative care during the critical time of COVID-19 lockdowns in India. The interruption of service delivery mechanisms due to poor health management, deficits of health workforce, infrastructural lacunae and fear of COVID-19 infection placed unprecedented challenges to cancer patients across the country in seeking healthcare services. Therefore, the government must be regularly vigilant and give priority under these emergency circumstances. However, the newly introduced National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) by the Government of India might be a catalyser that provides the necessary support for the integration of digital health infrastructure in the country even after such a pandemic havoc in the future.