Publication:

Household expenses in healthcare and its coping mechanism in rural Nepal

Background In Nepal, the most frequent mode of payment for health care is household expenditure. It accounts for more than half of all health-care expenditures. In addition, the study intends to investigate household expenditure on health care and its coping mechanisms in Nepal's rural districts.

Methods This is a quantitative, cross-sectional study in which 410 households were chosen using a multiple sampling procedure. The research study region was chosen using a purposive sampling strategy. The two wards for the study were chosen by a lottery system. The estimated households were then chosen using a systematic random selection technique. A semi-structured questionnaire was utilized to gather data, and a face-to-face interview with the household head was undertaken to obtain the data. SPSS version 20 was used to analyze all of the data.

Results The overall household health expenditure in Miklajung rural municipality was determined to be 31.7% in the previous six months, with the biggest expenditure in medicine/drugs or pharmacies, followed by in-patient care and health treatment abroad. Income/savings was discovered to be a major coping mechanism used to deal with household expenditure and was found to be significantly associated in a bivariate analysis with type of illness, age, and more with a confidence interval of 95% in a bivariate analysis.

Conclusions At the conclusion of the investigation, we discovered that people spent the most money on medicines and drugs, followed by in-patient hospital care. According to the findings, a significant portion of the target group used their income and savings to cover unexpected healthcare costs.