Determinants of National Health Insurance Scheme Utilization Among Heads of Households in Selected Communities in Ogun State, Nigeria

The study investigated the determinants of National Health Insurance Scheme Utilization among heads of households in selected communities in Ogun State, Nigeria. The study utilized descriptive cross-sectional design. A multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select 422 heads of households in selected communities of Ogun State. A self- structured questionnaire was designed by the researcher. The content and face validity of the instrument was done by experts of Tests and Measurement with background in Health Education. Cronbach’s alpha was utilized to estimate the reliability index of 0.80. Descriptive statistics were used to answer the research questions while linear regression was utilized to test the four hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed that some of the respondents do not utilize NHIS 144 (34.1%) while 278 (65.9%) of the respondents utilizes NHIS. Majority of the respondents 324 (78.8%) are knowledgeable about NHIS while 98 (23.2%) are not knowledgeable about NHIS. Majority of the respondents had positive attitude towards NHIS. In addition, there is a significant influence of knowledge (R² =0.683, p= 0.000), attitude (R² =0.872, p=0.000) and educational status (R² =0.896, p=0.000) on utilization of NHIS but economic status (R²= 0.094, p=0.199) has no significant influence on utilization of NHIS. It was recommended among others that Heads of households should be motivated by health practitioners on utilization of National Health Insurance Scheme as this will ensure achieving universal health coverage thereby reducing incurring debts and good health seeking behaviour of family members.

Keywords: Determinants, National Health Insurances Scheme, Utilization, Heads of Households,