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In Tanzania, health care is a mixture of public and private practice, with the public practice taking care of more than ninety percent of the clients. Public practice is state owned and the financial support is provided for by the Government funds and the donor community. In the past decade, this financial ssupport of public hospitals has significantly declined with hospitals receiving less than twenty percent of the allocated budget. Muhimbili National hospital, in an attempt to be self-sustaining public hospital, started the intramural private practice (IPPM) services. The factors affecting delivery and utilization of the private health services within public hospitals in Tanzania have never been documented. The main objective of this research to explore the factors affecting delivery and utilization of private health care services within public hospitals in Tanzania, Muhimbili National Hospital has been the case of this study.
Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used, the research relied on different theories through secondary data and in addition the primary data was collected through structured questionnaire, interviews, and observation and documentary sources.
The results of our study suggests that, poor customer awareness and high cost of services have been identified as the main reasons causing the IPPM to have few customers that utilizes the IPPM services. Also, poor hospital infrastructure, space constraint and low motivation were found to be the major challenges in delivering care as identified by the IPPM staff, this has led to overall, low customer satisfaction.
The overall findings indicate that, there are great possibilities for improving awareness knowledge, customer satisfaction and overall staff morale in the IPPM if the identified factors are taken into account. The organization has to pay attention to awareness creating activities, and also start thinking strategically about how to improve the overall customer satisfaction, staff morale and addressing the infrastructure challenge |
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