Determinants of demand for health care services and their implication on Health care financing: the case of Bure town

Asteraye Nahu

Ethiopian Journal of Economics, 2006, vol. 11, issue 01, 122

Abstract: This study attempts to identify the factors that determine the medical treatment seeking behaviour during illness and the demand for health care services by employing a maximum likelihood estimation technique and using primary data collected from a small woreda town in western Gojjam. The factors that are expected to have an influential impact are categorized as individual and/or household specific variables and choice specific variables.According to the estimated results of the two logit models employed in the study, individual and/or household specific variables such as sex of the patient, severity of illness, monthly income of the household and family size, and distance to reach the nearest health facility (a choice specific variable) are found to significantly affect whether treatment was sought at times of illness. On the other hand, patients' choices of health care service providers are found to be influenced by the age of the patient, sex of the household head and education level of the patient (from the category of individual and/or household specific variables) and by medical cost of treatment per visit and waiting time for treatment (from the choice specific category). All these, therefore, call for the intervention of the government in devising mechanisms that would help reduce the discrepancies observed in terms of sex, age, level of education and income, on the one hand, and in introducing appropriate policy measures that would facilitate the expansion of health facilities that provide best quality health care services at a cost affordable to the majority of the population, on the other.

Keywords: Health; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/249855/files/N ... 0care%20services.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:eeaeje:249855

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.249855

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Ethiopian Journal of Economics from Ethiopian Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().