Determinants Of Nhif Services Provision Among Accredited Drugs Dispensing Outlets In Kilombero District

ABSTRACT

Health insurance scheme is important in improving health finance in Tanzania. However, health insurance faces numerous difficulties including inadequate health services availability. This study attempted to assess the determinants of health insurance services provision among Accredited Drugs Dispensing Outlets (ADDOs) in Kilombero district. The objective of the study is to assess the social-economic factors affecting the response of private sector Accredited Drugs dispending Outlets (ADDOs) in providing the healthcare services to National Health Insurance Fund members in their facilities. Specifically, the study intended to identify the overall attitudes of the private health care providers towards NHIF services provision, identify the effect of capital size of private health care providers in provision of NHIF services, the effect of ADDOs owners’ level of education in provision of NHIF services and the effect of ADDOs location in provision of NHIF services. Multi-stage sampling technique was employed in the study where the first stage was to purposively selecting the study area. The second stage was stratification where the population was divided into two groups, for those who were providing NHIF services and for those who were not. At last, simple random sampling was applied in each stratum to obtain final representatives (sample) of 141 respondents involved in the study. Likert scale and Logistic regression were used to examine the attitude and odds ratio of a private sector to provide NHIF services respectively. The results revealed that the overall attitude was that the NHIF services provision has some limitations implementing. Capital size (p < 0.05) was a strong predictor of ADDOs to provide health insurance services. ADDOs owners’ level of education and ADDOs location were not good predictors of ADDOs to provide health insurance services (p > 0.05). It is recommended that there should be improvement in information provision regarding NHIF services provision to private sector, provision of loans for business capitals expansions, review of laws, rules and regulations which govern the operation of NHIF and ADDOs and the inclusion of informal sector workers in getting health insurance services in ADDOs to increase the coverage of health services in the country.