INTRODUCTION:
Health service research is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Health service is the multi-disciplinary field of scientific investigation that studies how social factors, financing system, organizational structures, and process health technologies and personal behavior affect access to health care.(Academy for health service research and health policy, 2000). Health service is concerned with problems in the organization, staffing, financing, utilization, and evaluation of health service. Health service is field of inquiry that examines the role of organization, financing manpower, technology, and prevention in the provision of health care service and their impact on utilization, costs, and quality care. The field draws on many disciplines to address this breath of research, include biostatistics, epidemiology, health economics, medicine, nursing, operation research, psychology, and medical sociology. (Stainwachs, 1991).
Health Facility: Are places that provides health care, they include Hospitals, clinics, outpatient care centers, and specialized care centers, such as birthing centers and psychiatric care centers. Health facility provides preventive, diagonostic and treatment services to persons who came to the facility to receive services and depart from the facility on the same day.
Health Service: Examines how people get access to health care, how much care costs, and what happens to patient as a result of this care. The main goals of health service research are to identify the most effective ways to organize, manage, finance, and deliver high quality care to reduce medical errors and improved patient safety.
A Health center: is a clinic staffed by a group of general practitioners and nurses, typical service covered are family practice and dental care, but some clinics have expanded greatly and can include internal medicine, pediatric, women care, family planning, pharmacy, lab, and more. In 2006, the national association of communities’ health centers has implemented a model for offering free rapid HIV testing to all patients between the age of 13 and 63 during routing.
Health Facility Utilization: Is the use of something especially for a practical purpose. For the purpose of this study utilization refers to the people participation in modern health care programmes and attitudes there to. Health care facility refers to the facilities and attitudes relating to orthodox medicine.
The following are some factors militating against the proper utilization of health facility:
1. Widespread poverty, which makes it very difficult for many people not to have good health.
2. In many rural health centers, it is a common knowledge that qualified health personnels are often lacking. Most hospital do not have resident Doctors even where one is posted to such hospital, they prefer to operate from outside the community where there is electricity and pipe borne water.
3. Also most of these rural communities are so infrastructural and economically underdeveloped that they cannot attract qualified private medical Doctors from urban areas.
4. The far distance of the hospitals is being located is another factor influencing the proper utilization of health facilities, because is not every one in the community that afford the transport fare to where the hospital is being located.
HEALTH SYSTEM IN NIGERIA
Nigeria operates three tiers of health system. First is primary health service which is the basic unit closest to the people and fall under the jurisdiction of local government councils. Examples include dispensaries, clinic, health center, health post, and comprehensive health centers.
The second is the secondary health services this is a more comprehensive and supplicated health service that handles more serious cases that cannot be handle by the primary health services. And include a range of specialized services provided by general hospitals, specialist hospitals, specialized and cottage hospitals. Secondary tier of health services is usually under the jurisdiction of state government. The third tier is the tertiary health services, which deals with more difficult and complicated health services and health problems particularly referral cases from secondary tier and supervised by the federal government of Nigeria.
Teaching hospitals and highly specialized hospitals, like Orthopedic and Ophthalmic hospital or centers (Ransome – Kuti, 1991). In Nigeria and other countries of the world, the provision of adequate health services to majority of the people’s is so important, it was one of the major goals of the fourth National development plan (National population Bureau- and Federal ministry of health, 1997).
Since health services are usually provided in health facilities like hospitals and clinics, their spatial patterning is crucial. Like other health facilities provided service at fixed points (Onokohoraye, 1996) their location should be in such a way that patient have access to them. This bring us the issue of even and uneven distribution more importantly because as argued (Fitpatrick, 1994) those health care system are to the match the provision of health care to the population. Different tiers of health facilities have different service area; inequality in the distribution of health care facilities may result in different in the quality of health services as argued (1996).
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