Access to Essential Health Services: Breaking Barriers - Essay Sample

Introduction

Health-care is an essential service that human beings require. A community needs to have access to disease prevention, vaccination, and treatment. People need to be sure to access the services whenever they need it. However, sometimes it may be difficult for people to have access to healthcare services. The difficulty in getting access to health facilities may be as a result of geographical or financial factors.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

One of the factors that hinder the accessibility of the essential health service is transportation. The movement of the people from their homes to the healthcare centers is, at times, challenging. The transportation problem mostly occurs in terms of additional transport costs. To reduce the problem of transport difficulty, the government should provide ambulances. The ambulances would make transportation of sick people to the hospitals, especially those who need emergency attendance (Laditka et al., 2009).

Another severe limitation of health care access is financial constrains. Some community members are so weak that they cannot afford to pay for the healthcare service. Poverty makes people unable to even pay for health insurance schemes. The problem brings a lot of difficulty in accessing the healthcare service. To curb this challenge, the government should ensure that the health service is affordable to even the most unfortunate community member. Alternatively, there is a need for the government to come up with more affordable health insurance policies (Brems et al., 2006).

Sometimes, people in the community are unable to access the necessary treatment due to the unavailability of enough qualified health personnel. As a result, they end up failing to get immediate access to the primary service (Sidwell, 1998). To improve healthcare service access, the government needs to ensure that it equips all the healthcare services with qualified personnel.

Another severe barrier to healthcare service access in our community is the lack of the necessary health technology. Some of our healthcare centers lack up-to-date technology that providers need to prevent and treat diseases. Treatment and diagnosing of the disease may become difficult due to the lack of appropriate equipment. To solve this problem, the government needs to dedicate more funds to buying of health equipment.

A country with improved healthcare is likely to achieve more sustainable development. Access to healthcare is possible only when all the barriers to health access are limited. The government and community, therefore, need to work together to achieve improved access to healthcare services.

References

Sidwell, J. (1998). Addressing the Health Information Needs of Rural Missouri Health Care Providers. Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 17(1), 39-48. https://doi.org/10.1300/j115v17n01_04

Brems, C., Johnson, M., Warner, T., & Roberts, L. (2006). Barriers to healthcare as reported by rural and urban interprofessional providers. Journal Of Interprofessional Care, 20(2), 105-118. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820600622208

Laditka, J., Laditka, S., & Probst, J. (2009). Health care access in rural areas: Evidence that hospitalization for ambulatory care sensitive conditions in the United States may increase with the level of rurality. Health & Place, 15(3), 761-770. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2008.12.007