Abstract
Purpose :
To explore associations between vision impairment (VI) and disruptions in health care (not obtained or delayed) due to COVID-19 in the 2021 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS).
Methods :
A cross-sectional study was implemented using the adult sample of the 2021 iteration of NHIS, a nationally-representative survey covering topics related to health status and care utilization. The exposure of interest was VI, defined as reporting “Some difficulty” “A lot of difficulty” or “Cannot see at all” to the question, “Do you have difficulty seeing?” The outcomes of interest were reporting disruptions in care due to COVID-19, including: not receiving home care, not receiving medical care, and delaying medical care. Other covariates included age, sex, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, family income-to-poverty ratio, health insurance status, and general health status. Unadjusted and adjusted logistic regression models assessed the associations between VI and the three care disruption outcomes in separate models.
Results :
The final analytic sample included 29,464 survey observations representing the national population of 252,972,542 adults. The weighted prevalence of VI was 17.0% (95% confidence interval [CI] 16.4-17.6%). Adults with VI had 2.97 times the unadjusted odds (95% CI: 1.21-3.98) and 1.47 times the adjusted odds (95% CI: 1.07-2.02) of not receiving home care due to COVID-19 compared to those without VI, adjusting for the covariates above. Adults with VI had 1.98 times the unadjusted odds (95% CI: 1.82-2.16) and 1.69 times the adjusted odds (95% CI: 1.54-1.85) of not receiving medical care due to COVID-19 compared to those without VI, adjusting for the covariates above. Finally, adults with VI had 1.73 times the unadjusted odds (95% CI: 1.60-1.87) and 1.56 times the adjusted odds (95% CI: 1.44-1.70) of delaying medical care due to COVID-19 compared to those without VI, adjusting for the covariates above.
Conclusions :
Adults with VI were more likely to experience disruptions in health care due to COVID-19 than those without VI in the nationally-representative sample of 2021 NHIS adults. These disruptions included home and medical care of all types, not just ophthalmic care. Additional studies are necessary to evaluate the impact of these interruptions of care and the design of interventions to minimize care disruptions.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.