RESEARCH ARTICLE
Awareness of Health Care Practitioners About the National Health Insurance in Tshwane District, South Africa
L.H. Mabuza*, G.A. Ogunbanjo, K.E. Hlabyago, M. Mogotsi
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2018Volume: 11
First Page: 93
Last Page: 103
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-11-93
DOI: 10.2174/1874944501811010093
Article History:
Received Date: 10/11/2017Revision Received Date: 12/03/2018
Acceptance Date: 19/03/2018
Electronic publication date: 30/03/2018
Collection year: 2018
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
In 2012, the National Department of Health of South Africa launched the National Health Insurance (NHI) pilot program in 11 districts, towards universal health coverage for all South Africans. Health Care Practitioners (HCPs) are important role-players in its implementation. We decided to evaluate to what extent the HCPs were aware of the NHI program after three years of the pilot phase.
Objective:
To evaluate the awareness of HCPs about the NHI in the pilot Tshwane district of South Africa.
Method:
A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 1753 HCPs in Tshwane district. At 95% confidence level and 5% error margin, the sample size was 315 HCPs, but we over-sampled to 480. The study was conducted in 25 health facilities within the district. A pre-tested self-administered questionnaire was used.
Results:
A high proportion of HCPs were unaware of the objectives of the NHI program (p < 0.001); number of NHI pilot sites [(281; 59.4%) versus (145; 30.7%), p < 0.001]; rationale used to select pilot sites [(223; 46.9%) versus (193; 40.5%), p = 0.047]; role of the Integrated School Health Services (ISHP) [(250; 52.7%) versus (70; 14.8%), p < 0.001]; and specialists constituting the District Clinical Specialist Team (DCST) (p < 0.001). However, awareness regarding the Ward-Based Outreach Team (WBOT) leader was high [(236; 49.9%) versus (135; 28.5%), p < 0.001].
Conclusion:
HCPs in Tshwane district demonstrated poor awareness of the NHI. This reveals that any awareness effort towards the NHI has not taken effect among the HCPs in this district.
