Background:
In the lower-middle-income countries, Pakistan is the fifth most populous and one of the lowest financiers in the health system country in the world. According to Pakistan’s National Health Vision 2016–2025 report, UHC is the highest priority while some other national programs and policies have also allied to it. Pakistan has OOP is 65% in 2016. Therefore, Pakistan has witnessed the
... [Show full abstract] sustainable developmental goal (SDGs) and reached a UHC service index score of 80, while the country score was 40 in 2015 and 50 in 2020.
Materials and Methods:
This was a comparative cross-sectional study carried out in Peshawar, northwest Pakistan. The outcome was patient satisfaction with “sehat sahulath program “a national insurance scheme in Pakistan. Data on patient satisfaction with the sehat sahulat program was collected from public and private tertiary care hospitals in Peshawar. A total of 410 patients enrolled via an adapted semi-structured questionnaire. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics for sociodemographic characteristics. Chi-square and Independent sample T-test was run for comparison of patient satisfaction in both public and private tertiary care hospitals.
Results:
The results, showed that patients’ awareness of sehat sahulath program, fulfillment of patient expectations, and patients’ perceived value of sehat sahulath coverage had directly affected patient satisfaction (p< 0.001). Privat hospitals had a greater level of satisfaction as compared to patients admitted in public tertiary hospital (p< 0.001).\
Conclusions:
Our study concludes that the public health insurance programs “The sehat sahulath program” can be introduced in all poor urban and rural regions of Pakistan, to avoid low-income families from facing hardship and financial devastation due to the burden of out-of-pocket expenditure OOP payments.
