Abstract

"Background: Household out-of-pocket expenditure on health comprise self-medication and other expenditure paid directly by private households, irrespective of whether the contact with the health care system was established on referral or on the patient’s own initiative. The study was conducted to estimate the out of pocket expenditure on health among the households in the urban field practice area; and also to study the various factor associated with out of pocket expenditure
Materials and Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted among 196 households in urban area of the Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka , from July to September 2015, The data was collected using a semi-structured questionnaire and analysed with SPSS v.22.0
Results: The mean out of pocket health expenditure was found to be INR 948.36. Most of the participant’s utilized public facility (46.5%) followed by private facility (40.9%) and only 11.6% of participants utilized both public and private facility together. There was statistically significant association between out of pocket expenditure and number of visits to hospital for acute and chronic disease.
Conclusions: The study showed that out of pocket expenditure on health care is very high in urban area."

Key words: Out of pocket expenditure, OOP urban area, health expenditure