PUBLIC’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SEEKING HEALTHCARE AND THEIR SATISFACTION WITH HEALTH SERVICES

Background: Health is an imperative feature of an individual’s life, by and large health status is considered as reduce in illness, low burden of disease and morbidity in general population. It is generally accepted that improved health is not simply controlled level of fertility or reduce in the mortality and morbidity but improvement in the overall productivity of an individual Objectives:To determine the determinant of public attitude towards seeking health service, and identify the level of their satisfaction with healthcare services. Methodology: This is a descriptive cross sectional study which was carried out in private and public hospitals of Karachi and Hyderabad. Questionnaire based survey was conducted to measure the health seeking behavior; as no standardize tool was available on this subject a self-designed questionnaire with the help of relevant studies, that was reviewed by subject experts and the corrections were made based on the experts suggestion. Data was collected through self-administration of questionnaire among the research subjects. Statistical and analytical software such as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and MS excel software is used for data analysis and representation. Frequencies and percentage are used; Chi-square test of significance at (p-value= 0.005) was used to determine the association of variables. Cron-bach’s alpha test was used to further determine the reliability of questionnaire. Results: The determinant identified which have significant effect on health seeking behavior were, gender, occupation, monthly income, cost of care, lack of sufficient information, accessibility to healthcare facility. The result showed significant association between level of satisfaction with healthcare service and attitude towards seeking healthcare services. Conclusion: As the planning and delivering of healthcare services is directly impact by populations’ attitude towards health care utilization; the findings of this study would help in providing a better understanding of population attitude and in designing a precise healthcare system to satisfy it