Catastrophic health expenditure on chronic non-communicable diseases among elder population: A cross-sectional study from a sub-metropolitan city of Eastern Nepal

• Published in: PloS one 2022-12, Vol.17 (12), p.e0279212-e0279212
• Main Authors: Rai, Sangita, Gautam, Swotantra, Yadav, Gopal Kumar, Niraula, Surya Raj, Singh, Suman Bahadur, Rai, Rajan, Poudel, Sagar, Sah, Ram Bilakshan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age; Aged; Cancer; Care and treatment; Catastrophic Illness; Chi-square test; Chronic diseases; Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; Confidence intervals; Consent; Cross-Sectional Studies; Data collection; Ethnicity; Evaluation; Expenditures; Families & family life; Family income; Health aspects; Health care; Health care facilities; Health Expenditures; Health insurance; Health services; Hospitals; Households; Humans; Hypertension; Mathematical analysis; Medical care, Cost of; Medicine and Health Sciences; Nepal; Noncommunicable Diseases - epidemiology; Older people; People and Places; Population; Population studies; Poverty; Questionnaires; Regression analysis; Social Sciences; Sociodemographics; Statistical analysis; Statistics
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279212

This study was conducted with the objective to analyze the out-of-pocket (OOP) healthcare expenditure and catastrophic healthcare expenditure (CHE) on chronic non-communicable diseases (CNCD) among the elderly population, and the association of CHE on CNCD with associated factors among the same population. We collected data from the elderly population of Dharan Sub-metropolitan city of the Eastern Nepal via door-to-door survey and face-to-face interview. The ten wards out of twenty were chosen by lottery method, and the equal proportion out of 280 samples was purposively chosen from each of ten wards (28 participants from each selected ward). The data were entered in Microsoft Excel 2019 v16.0 and statistical analysis was performed by using statistical package for social sciences, IBM SPSS® v21. The chi-square test was used to test the group differences. Multivariable logistic regression was used to determine independent factors associated with CHE (all variables with P < 0.20), and adjusted odds ratios (AOR) were calculated at 95% confidence interval (CI). The median household, food and health expenditures were 95325 (72112.50-126262.50), 45000 (33000-60000) and 2100 (885.00-6107.50) NPR respectively. The proportion of the participants with CHE was 14.6%. The single living participants had 3.4 times higher odds of catastrophic health expenditure (AOR = 3.4, 95% CI = 1.2-9.6, P-value = 0.022) than those who are married. Similarly, those who had cancer had 0.1 times lower odds of CHE (AOR = 0.1, 95% CI = 0.0-0.2, P-value =