Abstract

Primary health care centres were established to facilitate health service delivery in local communities. The practices of alternative health services among other factors, especially in the rural areas, affect patronage of health care centres. The extent to which the health care services are used among rural dwellers needed to be determined. The study was conducted in Oyo state Nigeria. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 147 respondents. Primary data for the study were collected using questionnaires to elicit information on respondents? socioeconomic characteristics, ailments prevalent in the study area, level of awareness, sources of information, perceived effectiveness, constraints and level of utilisation of Primary Health care (PHC) services. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics such as frequency count, percentages, and mean. Pearson Product Moment Correlation was used to establish the relationships between variables in the stated hypotheses. Most (65.3%) of the respondents were between the ages of 35 and 54 years, 61.2% of the respondents were male. A poor economic status of most rural household with a mean of 1.13 was the greatest constraint faced by respondents in utilising PHC services in the study area and utilisation of PHC services among respondents (53.7%). There was a significant relationship between the age (r = -0.337, p=0.000), years of formal education (r=0.566, p=0.000), household size (r =0.515, p=0.000), ailments (r=0.326, p=0.000) and constraints encountered (r=-0.0575, p=0.000) towards the utilisation of PHC services in the study area. As poor economic status of the rural household is the major problems identified by the respondents as challenges to the utilisation of PHC services it is recommended that all three tiers of government should contribute to the funding of PHC to subsidise the services in order to ensure continual usage of the health care services.

PDF