Indian Journal of Economics and Development

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Quality of Rural Public Healthcare Services in Northeastern Region of India: Analysis From User Perspective


Affiliations
1 Bharathidasan Government College for Women (Autonomous), Government of Puducherry, Pondicherry University, Union Territory of Puducherry-605003, India
2 Department of Economics, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong-22, Meghalaya, India
 

Background and Objective: Quality of public healthcare service is one of the major issues in the rural areas of India. Though integrated healthcare is provided by the government, the utilization of the same has been low due to various reasons and one could be the quality of service itself. Therefore, it is important that quality is assessed to constantly improve upon the health care services. This will help in more health care utilization by the rural people, which will help meeting the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in health care domain.

Data and Methodology: The data have been collected from the field in the summer of 2015. We have used Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to examine the structure of the relationship among variables representing the perceived quality dimensions of the rural public health care. The assessment is based on Likert scale of 1 to 5; where 1= strongly disagree, 2=disagree, 3=neither agree nor disagree, 4=agree and 5=strongly agree on access, usage, reliability and satisfaction factors. We also assessed the quality difference between Primary Health Centres (PHCs) and Community Health Centres (CHCs) by using t-test.

Results and Applications: Easy accessibility is a problem with the public health care service in the rural areas of Assam. Usage of the public health care service is poor even though reliability and satisfaction of the service are adequate. PHCs are found to be better than CHCs except in the reliability aspect. This could be due to the fact that accessibility of PHCs is better than the CHCs. The findings of the study suggest that the rural public health care needs to be improved and they should not act only as referral units. In order to improve the usage of the publicly provided health care service, awareness on health care utilization needs to be created which would also improve the health status of the people and also reduce the out of pocket spending on health care. However, for this to happen, improvement in the service provided is necessary.


Keywords

Rural Healthcare, User Perspective, Primary Healthcare, Likert Scale, Principal Component Analysis.
User
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  • Quality of Rural Public Healthcare Services in Northeastern Region of India: Analysis From User Perspective

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Authors

Joel Basumatary
Bharathidasan Government College for Women (Autonomous), Government of Puducherry, Pondicherry University, Union Territory of Puducherry-605003, India
Nirankar Srivastav
Department of Economics, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong-22, Meghalaya, India

Abstract


Background and Objective: Quality of public healthcare service is one of the major issues in the rural areas of India. Though integrated healthcare is provided by the government, the utilization of the same has been low due to various reasons and one could be the quality of service itself. Therefore, it is important that quality is assessed to constantly improve upon the health care services. This will help in more health care utilization by the rural people, which will help meeting the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in health care domain.

Data and Methodology: The data have been collected from the field in the summer of 2015. We have used Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to examine the structure of the relationship among variables representing the perceived quality dimensions of the rural public health care. The assessment is based on Likert scale of 1 to 5; where 1= strongly disagree, 2=disagree, 3=neither agree nor disagree, 4=agree and 5=strongly agree on access, usage, reliability and satisfaction factors. We also assessed the quality difference between Primary Health Centres (PHCs) and Community Health Centres (CHCs) by using t-test.

Results and Applications: Easy accessibility is a problem with the public health care service in the rural areas of Assam. Usage of the public health care service is poor even though reliability and satisfaction of the service are adequate. PHCs are found to be better than CHCs except in the reliability aspect. This could be due to the fact that accessibility of PHCs is better than the CHCs. The findings of the study suggest that the rural public health care needs to be improved and they should not act only as referral units. In order to improve the usage of the publicly provided health care service, awareness on health care utilization needs to be created which would also improve the health status of the people and also reduce the out of pocket spending on health care. However, for this to happen, improvement in the service provided is necessary.


Keywords


Rural Healthcare, User Perspective, Primary Healthcare, Likert Scale, Principal Component Analysis.

References