Studies from Wollo University Provide New Data on Public Health (Dropout rate and associated factors of community-based health insurance beneficiaries in Ethiopia: a systematic review and meta-analysis): Health and Medicine – Public Health

2023 DEC 22 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- A new study on public health is now available. According to news reporting originating from Wollo University by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “Ethiopia aims to achieve universal healthcare using health insurance. To do so, it has been implementing community-based health insurance since 2011.”

The news editors obtained a quote from the research from Wollo University: “However, the retention of members by the scheme has not yet been evaluated nationally. The systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to evaluate the dropout rate and associated factors among the scheme’s beneficiaries in Ethiopia. On December 19, 2022, searches were conducted in Scopus, Hinari, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar. Searches were also conducted on the general web and electronic repositories, including the Ethiopian Health Insurance Service, the International Institute for Primary Health Care-Ethiopia, and various higher education institutions. The Joanna Briggs Institute’s tools and the ‘preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses 2020 statement’ were used to evaluate bias and frame the review, respectively. Data were analyzed using Stata 17 and RevMan 5. To assess heterogeneity, we conducted subgroup analysis and used a random model to calculate odds ratios with a p value less than 0.05 and a 95% CI. In total, 14 articles were included in the qualitative synthesis, of which 12 were selected for the quantitative analysis. The pooled estimate revealed that the dropout rate of beneficiaries from the scheme was 34.0% (95% CI: 23-44%), provided that the renewal rate was 66.0%, and was found to be influenced by socio-demographic, health status, length of enrolment, knowledge, attitude, the scheme, and health service-related variables. The southern and Oromia regions reported the lowest and highest dropout rates, with 27.0% (95% CI: 24-29%) and 48.0% (95% CI: 18-78%), respectively. The dropout rates increased from 12.3% in 2012-2015 to 34.4% in 2020-2021.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “More than one-third of the scheme’s beneficiaries were found to have dropped out, and this has been found to increase over time, dictating that a community-based strategy and intervention, from the supply, insurer, and demand sides, seem indispensable in minimizing this huge dropout rate.”

For more information on this research see: Dropout rate and associated factors of community-based health insurance beneficiaries in Ethiopia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Public Health, 2023,23(1):1-16. (BMC Public Health - http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com). The publisher for BMC Public Health is BMC.

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-17351-7.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Husien Nurahmed Toleha, Department of Pharmacy, College of Medicine and Health sciences (CMHS), Wollo University. Additional authors for this research include Ewunetie Mekashaw Bayked.

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)