ArticlePLOS global public health2023
Perceived quality of care and choice of healthcare provider in informal settlements.
Article in PLOS global public health, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Urban-rural disparities in primary health care utilization in Indonesia: a cross-sectional study.Korean journal of family medicine · 2026Article
- What happens when public primary care is ill-prepared to respond to non-communicable diseases: a mixed-method study of diabetes and hypertension care in urban Nepal.Journal of global health · 2026Article
- 'It is the mother who will prepare [the] food that the father and children will eat': opportunities and constraints among household food preparers in urban slums in Nigeria.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Co-creation, co-design or co-production? Reflections on the development of urban health systems implementation strategies to improve access and quality of primary healthcare services in Bangladesh, Ghana, Nepal and Nigeria.Health research policy and systems · 2026Article
- Why Do Parents Take Their Children to Informal Healthcare Providers? Insights from Bangladesh.The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene · 2026Article
- Unlocking the potential of community pharmacies to address hypertension in South Asia: the COPE-BP programme.Journal of global health · 2026Article
- "They tossed me up like a ball": informal settlement residents' experiences in accessing healthcare in Kampala, Uganda.BMC public health · 2025Article
- The Economic Burden of Healthcare Utilization: Findings from a Health and Well-Being Survey in Informal Settlements of Freetown, Sierra Leone.Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine · 2025Article
- Inter-regional patient outmigration to Seoul in South Korea: the role of regional healthcare quality perceptions.BMC health services research · 2025Article
- An analysis of operational efficiency and its influencing factors in traditional Chinese medicine hospitals in Shaanxi Province, China.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Perceptions of health and healthcare needs in low-resource settings: qualitative insights from Bengaluru's urban slum and rural areas.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Community leaders' perspectives on linking formal and informal health providers in Nigerian urban slums: a qualitative study.Discover social science and health · 2025Article
- Determinants of treatment-seeking behaviour and healthcare provider choice in Afghanistan in 2018: a cross-sectional study.BMJ public health · 2024Article
- Factors Associated with Health-Seeking Behavior in Indonesia: Evidence from the Indonesian Family Life Survey 2014.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2024Article
- The relationship between food insecurity, purchasing patterns and perceptions of the food environment in urban slums in Ibadan, Nigeria.BMC nutrition · 2024Article
- Many hops, many stops: care-seeking "loops" for diabetes and hypertension in three urban informal settlements in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When a person chooses a healthcare provider, they are trading off cost, convenience, and a latent third factor: "perceived quality". In urban areas of lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including slums, individuals have a wide range of choice in healthcare provider, and we hypothesised that people do not choose the nearest and cheapest provider. This would mean that people are willing to incur additional cost to visit a provider they would perceive to be offering better healthcare. In this article, we aim to develop a method towards quantifying this notion of "perceived quality" by using a generalised access cost calculation to combine monetary and time costs relating to a visit, and then using this calculated access cost to observe facilities that have been bypassed. The data to support this analysis comes from detailed survey data in four slums, where residents were questioned on their interactions with healthcare services, and providers were surveyed by our team. We find that people tend to bypass more informal local services to access more formal providers, especially public hospitals. This implies that public hospitals, which tend to incur higher access costs, have the highest perceived quality (i.e., people are more willing to trade cost and convenience to visit these services). Our findings therefore provide evidence that can support the 'crowding out' hypothesis first suggested in a 2016 Lancet Series on healthcare provision in LMICs.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.