The behaviour towards malaria care - a multinomial logit approach

Attempts to estimate a disease specific demand function to study the determinants of utilisation of the services of a health care provider or treatment for malaria. Adapts a multinomial logit framework to look at facility characteristics and individual patient features on demand for malaria care in Ghana. Individual patient characteristics form a set of social indicators which can be used to group patients with respect to their choice of provider. Confirms the popular use of self-medication as a first choice of action. The choice of malaria care providers is influenced by facility price, travel time, waiting time, education, age, sex and quality of care in terms of drugs availability. As income increases, the odds are in favour of self-medication.