Determinants of Demand for Health Care Services and their Implication on Health Care Financing: The Case of Bure Town

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.