Access to healthcare facilities in poor and underdeveloped areas in nusa tenggara Timur Province

The equality of access to healthcare facilities corresponds to the degree of public health. The degree of public health in underdeveloped areas and borders is still far behind other regions, one of the provinces which has many underdeveloped regencies is the province of Nusa Tenggara Timur.

This study aims to give an overview of access to healthcare facilities from the perspective of resources and community capacity in Nusa Tenggara Timur Province (NTT) by using the perspective of supply and demand.

This study is based on secondary data, which is the 2013 Basic Health Research conducted by the Health Research and Development Agency of the Ministry of Health of Republic of Indonesia. This uses the total population of all households in NTT with multi-stage and clusters sampling techniques, with 10, 747 households sampled, which were selected based on the block census of the Central Statistics Agency (BPS).

The most popular healthcare facility among the households is Puskesmas, with a proportion of 86.4%, and the least popular is Poskesdes with a proportion of 5.8%, while public knowledge on Puskesmas or Pustu nationally is 89.8%. The type of transportation that is most often used to go to the Puskesmas is motorbikes, with a percentage of 39% and the lowest is bicycles with 0.1%, but if the healthcare provider is a hospital, the type of transportation that is most often used is public transport, the furthest healthcare provider with travel time > 60 minutes is the hospital and the shortest is < 16 minutes which is Posyandu, while the transportation cost to the healthcare facility is Posyandu, with the cost of < Rp 10.000.

The location of healthcare providers relatively far from households contributes to the knowledge about the availability of health care providers, the travel time, the alternative modes of transportation used, and the costs incurred to reach the healthcare provider. Puskesmas and Posyandu are still the most popular healthcare facilities because they are well-known, cheaper and closer.