1.
2.
Amani, Paul Joseph, 1975-
(författare)
Does health insurance contribute to improving responsiveness of the health system? : the case of elderly in rural Tanzania
2022
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Background: Financing healthcare in Tanzania has for years depended on out-of-pocket payments. This mechanism has been criticized as being inefficient, contributing to inequity and high cost as well as denying access to healthcare to those most in need, including the elderly in rural areas. Health insurance (HI) was recently introduced as an instrument to enable equitable access to healthcare and thus to improve the responsiveness of the health system. Even though health insurance is expected to bring benefits to those who are insured, there is a lack of specific studies in the country looking at the role of HI in facilitating the health system responsiveness among vulnerable populations of remote areas.Aim: The aim of this thesis is to understand if and how health insurance contributes to improving the responsiveness of the healthcare system among the elderly in rural Tanzania. Methods: Four interrelated sub-studies (2 quantitative and 2 qualitative) were conducted in Igunga and Nzega districts of Tabora region between July 2017 and December 2018. The first two sub-studies are based on a household survey using an adapted version of the World Health Organization’s Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health questionnaire. Elderly people aged 60 years and above who had used both outpatient and inpatient healthcare three and twelve months prior to the study, respectively, were interviewed. Whereas in sub-study 1 the focus was to investigate the role of health insurance status on facilitating access to healthcare, sub-study 2 assessed the relationship between health insurance and the health system responsiveness domains. In sub-study 3, interviews with healthcare providers were carried out to capture their perspective regarding the functioning of the health insurance. In the final sub-study 4, focus group discussions with elderly were conducted in order to explore their experience of healthcare, depending on their health insurance status. Crude and adjusted logistic and quantile regression models were applied to analyse the association between health insurance and access to healthcare (sub-study 1) and responsiveness (sub-study 2), respectively. For both sub-studies 3 and 4, qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data.Results: Sub-studies 1 and 2 involved a total of 1899 insured and uninsured elderly, while sub-studies 3 and 4 included 8 health providers and 78 elderlies respectively. Sub-study 1 showed that about 45% of the elderly were insured and HI ownership improved access and utilization of healthcare, both outpatient and inpatient services. In sub-study two, however, health insurance was associated with a lower responsiveness of the healthcare system. In general, all six domains: cleanliness, access, confidentiality, autonomy, communication, and prompt attention were rated high, but three were of concern: waiting time; cleanliness; and communication. Sub-study 3 uncovered several challenges coexisting alongside the provision of insurance benefits and thus contributing to a lower responsiveness. These included shortage of human resources and medical supplies, as well as operational issues related to delays in funding reimbursement. In sub-study 4, the elderly revealed that HI did not meet their expectations, it failed to promote equitable access, provided limited-service benefits and restricted use of services within residential areas. Conclusion: While HI seems to increase the access to and use of healthcare services by the elderly in rural Tanzania, a lower responsiveness by the healthcare system among the insured elderly was reported. Long waiting times, limited-service benefits, restricted use of services within schemes, lack of health workforce in both numbers and skills as well as shortage of medical supplies were important explanations for the lower responsiveness. The results of this thesis, while supporting the national aim of expanding HI in rural areas, also exposed several weaknesses that require immediate attention. There is a need to, first, review the insurance policy to improve its implementation, expand the scope of services coverage, and where possible, to introduce cross-subsidization between the publicly owned schemes; additionally, improvements in the healthcare infrastructure, increasing the number of qualified health workforce and the availability of essential medicines and laboratory services, especially at the primary healthcare facilities, should be prioritized and further investments allocated.
3.
Amani, Paul Joseph, et al.
(författare)
Health insurance and health system (un) responsiveness : a qualitative study with elderly in rural Tanzania
2021
Ingår i: BMC Health Services Research. - : BioMed Central. - 1472-6963. ; 21:1
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat) abstract
BACKGROUND: Health insurance (HI) has increasingly been accepted as a mechanism to facilitate access to healthcare in low and middle-income countries. However, health insurance members, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa, have reported a low responsiveness in health systems. This study aimed to explore the experiences and perceptions of healthcare services from the perspective of insured and uninsured elderly in rural Tanzania.METHOD: An explanatory qualitative study was conducted in the rural districts of Igunga and Nzega, located in western-central Tanzania. Eight focus group discussions were carried out with 78 insured and uninsured elderly men and women who were purposely selected because they were 60 years of age or older and had utilised healthcare services in the past 12 months prior to the study. The interview questions were inspired by the domains of health systems' responsiveness. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data.RESULTS: Elderly participants appreciated that HI had facilitated the access to healthcare and protected them from certain costs. But they also complained that HI had failed to provide equitable access due to limited service benefits and restricted use of services within schemes. Although elderly perspectives varied widely across the domains of responsiveness, insured individuals generally expressed dissatisfaction with their healthcare.CONCLUSIONS: The national health insurance policy should be revisited in order to improve its implementation and expand the scope of service coverage. Strategic decisions are required to improve the healthcare infrastructure, increase the number of healthcare workers, ensure the availability of medicines and testing facilities at healthcare centers, and reduce long administrative procedures related to HI. A continuous training plan for healthcare workers focused on patients' communication skills and care rights is highly recommended.
4.
Amani, Paul Joseph, et al.
(författare)
Healthcare workers´ experiences and perceptions of the provision of health insurance benefits to the elderly in rural Tanzania : an explorative qualitative study
2023
Ingår i: BMC Public Health. - : BioMed Central (BMC). - 1471-2458. ; 23:1
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat) abstract
BACKGROUND: Healthcare workers play an important part in the delivery of health insurance benefits, and their role in ensuring service quality and availability, access, and good management practice for insured clients is crucial. Tanzania started a government-based health insurance scheme in the 1990s. However, no studies have specifically looked at the experience of healthcare professionals in the delivery of health insurance services in the country. This study aimed to explore healthcare workers' experiences and perceptions of the provision of health insurance benefits for the elderly in rural Tanzania.METHODS: An exploratory qualitative study was conducted in the rural districts of Igunga and Nzega, western-central Tanzania. Eight interviews were carried out with healthcare workers who had at least three years of working experience and were involved in the provision of healthcare services to the elderly or had a certain responsibility with the administration of health insurance. The interviews were guided by a set of questions related to their experiences and perceptions of health insurance and its usefulness, benefit packages, payment mechanisms, utilisation, and availability of services. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data.RESULTS: Three categories were developed that describe healthcare workers´ experiences and perceptions of delivering the benefits of health insurance for the elderly living in rural Tanzania. Healthcare workers perceived health insurance as an important mechanism to increase healthcare access for elderly people. However, alongside the provision of insurance benefits, several challenges coexisted, such as a shortage of human resources and medical supplies as well as operational issues related to delays in funding reimbursement.CONCLUSION: While health insurance was considered an important mechanism to facilitate access to care among rural elderly, several challenges that impede its purpose were mentioned by the participants. Based on these, an increase in the healthcare workforce and availability of medical supplies at the health-centre level together with expansion of services coverage of the Community Health Fund and improvement of reimbursement procedures are recommended to achieve a well-functioning health insurance scheme.
5.
Amani, Paul Joseph, et al.
(författare)
Responsiveness of health care services towards the elderly in Tanzania : does health insurance make a difference? A cross-sectional study
2020
Ingår i: International Journal for Equity in Health. - : Springer Nature. - 1475-9276. ; 19:1
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat) abstract
Background: Responsiveness has become an important health system performance indicator in evaluating the ability of health care systems to meet patients' expectations. However, its measurement in sub-Saharan Africa remains scarce. This study aimed to assess the responsiveness of the health care services among the insured and non-insured elderly in Tanzania and to explore the association of health insurance (HI) with responsiveness in this population.Methods: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted in 2017 where a pre-tested household survey, administered to the elderly (60 + years) living in Igunga and Nzega districts, was applied. Participants with and without health insurance who attended outpatient and inpatient health care services in the past three and 12 months were selected. Responsiveness was measured based on the short version of the World Health Organization (WHO) multi-country responsiveness survey study, which included the dimensions of quality of basic amenities, choice, confidentiality, autonomy, communication and prompt attention. Quantile regression was used to assess the specific association of the responsiveness index with health insurance adjusted for sociodemographic factors.Results: A total of 1453 and 744 elderly, of whom 50.1 and 63% had health insurance, used outpatient and inpatient health services, respectively. All domains were rated relatively highly but the uninsured elderly reported better responsiveness in all domains of outpatient and inpatient care. Waiting time was the dimension that performed worst. Possession of health insurance was negatively associated with responsiveness in outpatient (− 1; 95% CI: − 1.45, − 0.45) and inpatient (− 2; 95% CI: − 2.69, − 1.30) care.Conclusion: The uninsured elderly reported better responsiveness than the insured elderly in both outpatient and inpatient care. Special attention should be paid to those dimensions, like waiting time, which ranked poorly. Further research is necessary to reveal the reasons for the lower responsiveness noted among insured elderly. A continuous monitoring of health care system responsiveness is recommended.
6.
7.
Baltussen, Rob, et al.
(författare)
Balancing efficiency, equity and feasibility of HIV treatment in South Africa : development of programmatic guidance
2013
Ingår i: Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation. - : BioMed Central (BMC). - 1478-7547. ; 11:1
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat) abstract
South Africa, the country with the largest HIV epidemic worldwide, has been scaling up treatment since 2003 and is rapidly expanding its eligibility criteria. The HIV treatment programme has achieved significant results, and had 1.8 million people on treatment per 2011. Despite these achievements, it is now facing major concerns regarding (i) efficiency: alternative treatment policies may save more lives for the same budget; (ii) equity: there are large inequalities in who receives treatment; (iii) feasibility: still only 52% of the eligible population receives treatment.Hence, decisions on the design of the present HIV treatment programme in South Africa can be considered suboptimal. We argue there are two fundamental reasons to this. First, while there is a rapidly growing evidence-base to guide priority setting decisions on HIV treatment, its included studies typically consider only one criterion at a time and thus fail to capture the broad range of values that stakeholders have. Second, priority setting on HIV treatment is a highly political process but it seems no adequate participatory processes are in place to incorporate stakeholders' views and evidences of all sorts.We propose an alternative approach that provides a better evidence base and outlines a fair policy process to improve priority setting in HIV treatment. The approach integrates two increasingly important frameworks on health care priority setting: accountability for reasonableness (A4R) to foster procedural fairness, and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to construct an evidence-base on the feasibility, efficiency, and equity of programme options including trade-offs. The approach provides programmatic guidance on the choice of treatment strategies at various decisions levels based on a sound conceptual framework, and holds large potential to improve HIV priority setting in South Africa.
8.
Baroudi, Mazen, et al.
(författare)
Access of Migrant Youths in Sweden to Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare : A Cross-sectional Survey
2022
Ingår i: International Journal of Health Policy and Management. - : Kerman University of Medical Sciences. - 2322-5939. ; 11:3, s. 287-298
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat) abstract
Background: This study aims to assess migrant youths’ access to sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRHC) in Sweden, to examine the socioeconomic differences in their access, and to explore the reasons behind not seeking SRHC. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted for 1739 migrant youths 16 to 29 years-old during 2018. The survey was self-administered through: ordinary post, web survey and visits to schools and other venues. We measured access as a 4-stage process including: healthcare needs, perception of needs, utilisation of services and met needs. Results: Migrant youths faced difficulties in accessing SRHC services. Around 30% of the participants needed SRHC last year, but only one-third of them fulfilled their needs. Men and women had the same need (27.4% of men [95% CI: 24.2, 30.7] vs. 32.7% of women [95% CI: 28.2, 37.1]), but men faced more difficulties in access. Those who did not categorise themselves as men or women (50.9% [95% CI: 34.0, 67.9]), born in South Asia (SA) (39% [95% CI: 31.7, 46.4]), were waiting for residence permit (45.1% [95% CI: 36.2, 54.0]) or experienced economic stress (34.5% [95% CI: 30.7, 38.3]) had a greater need and found more difficulties in access. The main difficulties were in the step between the perception of needs and utilisation of services. The most commonly reported reasons for refraining from seeking SRHC were the lack of knowledge about the Swedish health system and available SRHC services (23%), long waiting times (7.8%), language difficulties (7.4%) and unable to afford the costs (6.4%). Conclusion: There is an urgent need to improve migrant youths’ access to SRHC in Sweden. Interventions could include: increasing migrant youths’ knowledge about their rights and the available SRHC services; improving the acceptability and cultural responsiveness of available services, especially youth clinics; and improving the quality of language assistance services.
9.
Baroudi, Mazen, 1984-
(författare)
Leaving the door ajar : young migrants’ sexual and reproductive health in Sweden
2022
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Young people and migrants are both prioritized groups regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), but studies about the sexual andreproductive health (SRH) of young migrants in Sweden are scarce. The aim of this thesis was to study the SRH of young migrants in Sweden, and specifically to: 1) explore how do young migrants understand SRH, and how do they experience their sexual rights; and 2) examine how do young migrants perceive and experience the process of accessing SRH services, including their approachability, acceptability, adequacy and quality.This thesis is built upon three studies, which collected quantitative data (a national survey – Papers 1 and 2, and a youth clinics survey – Paper 3) and qualitative data (a qualitative study – Paper 4). The national survey is a population-based cross sectional study, which recruited 1773 newly arrived young migrants aged 16 to 29 years through visits to schools and other venues, letters sent home, and via a web survey. The data was analysed through descriptive statistics (Paper 1) and multivariate multiple linear regression (Paper 2). The youth clinic survey is a clinic-based cross-sectional study whichrecruited 1089 youths (118 had at least one parent born outside Sweden/Scandinavia) aged 16 to 25 years after their visit to a youth clinic in the four most northern regions in Sweden. I used multi-level analysis to analyse the data. The qualitative study builds upon 13 semi-structured interviews with newly arrived Arabic-speaking migrant men, which were analysed through qualitative thematic analysis.Young migrants understood SRH as both “essential” and a “right”. The sexual rights of young migrants in Sweden were less fulfilled, compared to those of other young people in Sweden, and there were differences between the various groups of young migrants. The rights of men; people identifying as non-binary; people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or asexual (LGBA); those born in South Asia; those without a residence permit; and people of low economic status were fulfilled to a lesser extent compared to their counterparts.Studying the process of accessing SRH services – including sexual education and information, and services related to sexual function, sexually transmitted diseases and gender-based violence, as well as infertility, pregnancy, delivery, contraceptives and abortion – showed barriers and facilitators. SRH serviceswere to a large extent non-approachable; almost half of those who needed these services in the national survey did not use them. SRH services were perceived, with some exceptions, as acceptable due to the “open environment” of Sweden; however, some young migrants faced a lack of cultural sensitivity in iv SRH services, low parental support, and fear of exposure, which decreased their acceptability of the services. Regarding adequacy, young migrants complained about long waiting times for receiving care particularly specialised care, and that SRH services did not take their problems seriously. Those who visited youth clinics, however, perceived them as providing convenient and timely services. The quality of SRH services was perceived as good in general; the majority of young migrants were satisfied with SRH services in the national survey and perceived youth clinics as very friendly. However, negative experiences were reported in the national survey, where almost half of those who visited SRH services had at least one negative experience in the five domains of respect, equity, quality of consultation, privacy and non-prejudice. Migrant youths also reported worse experiences in the youth clinic survey than Swedish/Scandinavian youths in the domains of respect, equity and quality of consultation. Their legal entitlement to access most SRH services, the availability of good quality services and the “open environment” facilitate young migrants’ access to SRH services, however, their limited access to sexual education and to information about the health system, and cultural insensitivity and cultural racism when providing information and services, are serious barriers to young migrants’ access to SRH services.
10.
Baroudi, Mazen, et al.
(författare)
Men and sexual and reproductive healthcare in the Nordic countries : a scoping review
2021
Ingår i: BMJ Open. - : BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. - 2044-6055. ; 11:9
Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat) abstract
Context: Men generally seek healthcare less often than women and, other than traditional gender norms, less is known about the explanation. The aim was to identify knowledge gaps and factors influencing men regarding sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRHC) in the Nordic countries.Methods: We searched PubMed and SveMed+ for peer-reviewed articles published between January 2010 and May 2020. The analyses identified factors influencing men’s experiences of and access to SRHC.Results: The majority of the 68 articles included focused on pregnancy, birth, infertility and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. During pregnancy and childbirth, men were treated as accompanying partners rather than individuals with their own needs. The knowledge and attitudes of healthcare providers were crucial for their ability to provide SRHC and for the experiences of men. Organisational obstacles, such as women-centred SRHC and no assigned healthcare profession for men’s sexual and reproductive health issues, hindered men’s access to SRHC. Lastly, the literature rarely discussed the impact of health policies on men’s access to SRHC.Conclusions: The literature lacked the perspectives of specific groups of men such as migrants, men who have sex with men and transmen, as well as the experiences of men in SRHC related to sexual function, contraceptive use and gender-based violence. These knowledge gaps, taken together with the lack of a clear entry point for men into SRHC, indicate the necessity of an improved health and medical education of healthcare providers, as well as of health system interventions.
