Perceptions of Care, Socio-Demographic Characteristics and Health Care Utilisation among Health Insurance users in Ghana

Abstract

The socio-demographic characteristics of clients and their perception of quality of care play a major part in people’s decision making process especially in service utilization. This study assesses the relationship between clients’ socio-economic features as well as their perceived quality on health care utilization. The study adopted a non-experimental cross sectional design in eliciting information from health clients who accessed health services in ten selected hospitals in the Kumasi Metropolis with a cluster sampling design to select 400 clients from the ten health facilities purposely selected. The researcher used interviews and semi structured questionnaires to collect data and used SPSS version 20 for processing whiles descriptive and inferential statistics was supported with STATA 11. Perception about the quality of health provision influenced access of healthcare with NHIS cards. Clients who viewed the overall quality of health provision as good or very good were more likely to access healthcare with NHIS card as compared to those who rated the overall health provision as poor or very poor (OR = 2.1; p<0.01). Socio-demographic factors continuously play a strong role in influencing clients to access health care under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) as the high income groups still dominate in utilizing health care services under the scheme than the deprived and the poor. Increased enrolment in the scheme should be supported with provision of quality services to enhance clients’ satisfaction. Also, socio-demographic characteristics influence the utilization of health care.