The Behaviour towards Malaria Care: A Multinomial Logit Approach

This paper attempts to estimate a disease specific demand function to study the determinants of utilisation of the services of a health care provider or a treatment regiment for malaria. The study adapts a multinomial logit framework to look at both facility characterstics and individual patient fea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social indicators research 1996-01, Vol.39 (2), p.167-186
Main Authors: Asenso-Okyere, W. K., Dzator, Janet A., osei-Akoto, Isaac
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Antimalarials
Behaviour
Diseases
Fever
Ghana
Health Behavior
Health care
Health care costs
Health care facilities
Health Care Utilization
Illness Behavior
Loglinear Analysis
Malaria
Medical Decision Making
Multinomial regression analysis
Prescription drugs
Self medication
Social Indicators
Social research
Sociology
Sociology of health and medicine
Traditional Societies
Training
Travel time
Treatment
Vector-borne diseases
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Summary:This paper attempts to estimate a disease specific demand function to study the determinants of utilisation of the services of a health care provider or a treatment regiment for malaria. The study adapts a multinomial logit framework to look at both facility characterstics and individual patient features on demand for malaria care in Ghana. The individual patient characterstics form a set of social indicators which can be used to discriminate or put into groups patients with respect to their choice of provider. The study confirms the popular use of self-medication as a first choice of action in treating malaria. The choice of malaria care providers is found to be influenced by facility price, travel time, waiting time for treatment, education, age, sex and quality of care measured in terms of drugs availability. We further find that as income increases, the odds are in favour of self-medication when people get malaria. The paper calls for the intensification of the minimum training given to chemical sellers and the expansion of the paramedical staff training to assist in health care delivery in Ghana. Provision of education would tend to increase utilisation of government health services and thereby improve the quality of life of the people.
ISSN:0303-8300
1573-0921
DOI:10.1007/BF00286972