Household use of inpatient healthcare services in India

Abstract

Improving household use of healthcare facilities is a vital public health strategy to reduce burden of disease in India. Our study set out to understand the importance of the interplay of household characteristics and state-level public health covariates in accessing inpatient healthcare services. The study is based on morbidity and healthcare data from the 60th round of the Indian National Sample Survey Organisation, 2004. We used multilevel logistic regression to disentangle dependence among the observations. We observed that the education level of household heads and the household’s economic well-being had a significant positive influence on accessing inpatient healthcare services. Distance from the household to the health facility showed a significant inverse association with use of health facilities for inpatient treatment. Further, we found a significant variation across the states. Variability in accessing inpatient services at the household and state levels are 1.7% and 21% respectively.