The behaviour towards malaria care—a multinomial logit approach

This paper attempts to estimate a disease specific demand function to study the determinants of utilisation of the services of a health care provider or a treatment regiment for malaria. The study adapts a multinomial logit framework to look at both facility characteristics and individual patient features on demand for malaria care in Ghana. The individual patient characteristics form a set of social indicators which can be used to discriminate or put into groups patients with respect to their choice of provider.The study confirms the popular use of self-medication as a first choice of action in treating malaria. The choice of malaria care providers is found to be influenced by facility price, travel time, waiting time for treatment, education, age, sex and quality of care measured in terms of drugs availability. We further find that as income increases, the odds are in favour of self-medication when people get malaria.