Women's Participation In Health Care

2.0 Introduction

This chapter of the study will review literature on the concept of health, health care utilization, household decision making, and the linkages between women 's participation in household decision making and Health care utilization. The objective is to position the study within a larger body of theoretical and empirical literature. The chapter will be organized as follows. After the introductory comments, the chapter will proceed to take a look at the definition of the main concepts in section 2.1. This will be followed by addressing health care utilization 2.2. Section 2.3 exhibits the nexus between women 's participation in household decision making and health care utilization. 2.1 Concepts of Health

2.1.1 What is health?

The importance of health care delivery on the global scale is undeniable. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 that is, to be attained in 2030 is the achievement of a Universal Health Coverage. The goal is to ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for everyone (Griggs et. al., 2013). The health systems of Africa like other third world countries is badly hampered by migration of health professionals, mostly in the western world. An estimated deficit 817,992 was recorded in Africa in 2009 (Naicker et. al., 2009). Steady increment in health care problems throughout the years has drawn the consideration of most advancement scholars thus now; healthcare has turned into the center of sociological and political civil argument for over a century. The debate over the causes, outcomes, and answers for poor healthcare systems has included recharged interest and significance in the later decades because of the great concentration of this in the developing countries. The World Health Organization (2010) admitted that, even though health care systems do not function well without adequate and well prepared health care professional, these professionals are globally inadequate as the world seriously suffer a shortage of 4.3 million them. The developing World is highly affected by this global phenomena. Most health professionals migrate to other places because of push

In a study carried out by Dodd et. Al. (2001), informants were very particular about the criticality of health care services to their survival and livelihoods, even though, they admitted poverty and other factors have a great deal of influence on their ability to access these facilities when necessary . Health care utilisation may be defined as the ability of a sick person to access a good and efficient health care services without and setbacks. In other words, health care utilisation represents society’s ability to provide adequate and excellent health care services to customers that are in demand of it. The term health care utilization has been employed by numerous authors to refer mean provision health needs, and they have even used it to refer to ready access to efficient health care services, especially in the social sciences. For instance, Andersen in 1968 established a three-stage model to explain how households access health facilities. He uses components like predisposing, need and enabling with its component having a sub-component. The predisposing component deals with family composition, health beliefs and social structure, whereas the need component tackles issues of illness and response and that of enabling looks at family and community resources. Per the model, issues like age, sex, marital status, family size, social status, race and ethnicity are under predisposing factor. To his symptoms,