IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/deveza/v29y2012i5p704-724.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

What do we know about health service utilisation in South Africa?

Author

Listed:
  • Olufunke A Alaba
  • Di McIntyre

Abstract

This paper compares data from two household surveys to assess the effect of questionnaire design on estimated use of health services and analyses this across geographic areas and different groups. Deficiencies in the design of Statistics South Africa's General Household Survey led to a substantial underestimation of utilisation (capturing less than a third of visits). The South Africa Consortium for Benefit Incidence Analysis survey, which was more comprehensive, indicated that three out of four outpatient visits are to public sector facilities. Medical scheme membership is the most important predictor of using a private provider, particularly for inpatient care. Socioeconomic status and rural versus urban residence also influence overall utilisation rates and use of public versus private providers. It is critical to improve the design of routine household surveys to monitor utilisation patterns during the implementation of the proposed health system reform.

Suggested Citation

  • Olufunke A Alaba & Di McIntyre, 2012. "What do we know about health service utilisation in South Africa?," Development Southern Africa, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(5), pages 704-724, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:deveza:v:29:y:2012:i:5:p:704-724
    DOI: 10.1080/0376835X.2012.730973
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0376835X.2012.730973
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/0376835X.2012.730973?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Morné Oosthuizen, 2019. "Inequality and the generational economy: Race-disaggregated National Transfer Accounts for South Africa, 2015," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2019-24, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:deveza:v:29:y:2012:i:5:p:704-724. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CDSA20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.