Healhcare Utilization on Indonesian’s Children: The Effect of Poverty and Maternal Characteristics

Abstract

Utilization of health care is an important determinant to improve health status, especially for children. However, poverty and parental characteristis especially mother are important determinant of healthcare utilization for children. This use Indonesia National Socio-Economic Survey (SUSENAS) 2017 and Village Potential Statistic (PODES) 2018 to study the effect of that variables to outpatient healhcare utilization for children. The sample in this research are 50.437 children who has the health complaints, disrupted activity in the past month and living with mother. Data analysis was carried out descriptively and using logistic regression. The result showed that one out of three children do not utilizising healthcare for outpatient when sick. Furthermore, logistic regression shows that family poverty has negative and significant effect on the children’s utilization of healthcare for outpatient in Indonesia (OR=0,79). While maternal education and employment status have significant and positive effect. This result showed that there are necessarily to provide an ease access to healthcare for the children in poor household and to improve maternal empowerment to be able to increase the utilization of healthcare especially outpatient care for children.