A Exploring Health care seeking behavior of people engaged in the informal sector in an urban area, Bangladesh: Evidence from Dhaka city

It is necessary to develop a tool for understanding how populations engage with health systems, rather than using health seeking behavior as a tool for describing how individuals engage with services; explicitly to make more importance of the links between health seeking behavior of the individual and wider theoretical models of the local dynamics of health systems and social participation. Under this background principal the objective of the study was to explore the health care seeking behavior of households that maintained their living by working in the informal sector of Dhaka City. The implicit amplification of this objective was to identify the impact of heterogeneous socio-economic characteristics on health care seeking behavior for a group of people who are increasingly left out of the proper health care system. From this perspective the study assessed the association between several explanatory factors and health care seeking behaviors. From the Chi-square analysis study findings show several variables have a significant relationship with dependent variables. The significant explanatory variables in terms of predisposing factors were income level, household educational status, and occupational status, number of years staying at Dhaka city and in terms of disorder characteristics were perceived morbidity, reasons for care seeking, and in terms of service characteristics knowledge about service provider, health related decision making process. Later according to multivariate stepwise binary regression analysis a predictive model was specified to identify the probabilistic attachment on household's possibility to seek health care, and found that educational status of household head, knowledge about service provision and perceived morbidity were the most crucial factors for probabilistic attachment of household's health care seeking behaviors.