Improving Healthcare Access for the Underserved in Northern Nigeria: Can the Patent Medicine Vendors (PMVs) Really Help?

Abstract

To address the health workforce deficit in underserved communities, the Federal Government of Nigeria is contemplating a licensing policy to delegate the provision of some basic health services to patent medicine vendors (PMVs) manned by a skilled health workforce. However, it remains unclear whether residents of underserved communities intend to receive these healthcare services through PMVs. We, therefore, sought to assess the intention to receive basic healthcare from PMVs among 665 heads of households from randomly selected 40 underserved communities in two northern Nigeria states. We used an interviewer-administered questionnaire to collect data between December 2021 and February 2022 for this cross-sectional study. The data were analyzed with STATA version 16. We used the Chi-square test to investigate the factors associated with ‘intention’ and Binary logistic regression to identify its predictors. The level of statistical significance was determined at P<0.05. We found that 38.8% of the underserved intend to receive basic health services through PMVs and that respondents who reside in rented buildings or temporary shelters and those who have a high level of trust in PPMVs had higher odds of intending to receive healthcare through PMVs. These findings suggest that PMVs can reach slightly above one-third of the underserved with healthcare. We recommend that healthcare administrators should consider designing additional complementary interventions that can be coherently implemented alongside this initiative to significantly improve healthcare access among the underserved.

Publication Title

Texila International Journal of Public Health

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