Health Care: Barriers to Health Care Access for African Culture
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Institutional Affiliation
Health Care
Health is one of the most necessities required for human welfare. Most countries have invested in their health care facilities, and also outsource other modernized health care services from other developed countries to boost their health-based care systems and services. However, despite the quest of seeking improved health care by other countries, the African countries are still lagging in their health care service provision. According to the statistics filed by the World Health Organization in 2019, it was reported that less than 50 percent of countries located in Africa can enjoy the availability of improved medical facilities. Providing further insight into how Africa based countries are lagging in the accessibility of proper health care, WHO reported that Sierra Leone is currently ranked with a health system performance index of 0.00, making it the poorest country in terms of health care accessibility globally. The statistics posted above is sufficient evidence that African countries have limited access to health care. Therefore, it is important to expound on the barriers to health care accessibly in the African continent.
The first barrier to health care access among African nations is their low investment towards medical facilities. The report by WHO revealed that most of the countries in Africa allocate a GDP percentage of less than 10% as their health care budget annually (WHO, 2019). The percentage mentioned above is clear evidence that Africa countries fail to prioritize health care as an important good in the economy. Comparatively, the US has a 17.7% GDP allocation on health care, which makes its health care accessibility efficient (WHO, 2019). Therefore, due to the low budget on health care, African countries remain behind Healthwise.
Another barrier to health care access among African nations is the manner in, which the African culture intersects with externalities related to poverty and equity. Due to poverty in Africa, the countries lack the cultural competence of health provision programs since they lack the funds to train competent personnel and also acquire improved health infrastructure. From the perspective of equity, the global funds from the World Bank are not equally channeled to African countries due to institutional racism. Thus, such countries lack the financial support to improve their facilities.
In the quest of analyzing the barriers of health care access in Africa, several factors have been drawn. Some of these factors are internal while others are external. The internal factor is their low budget on health care. The external barrier is economic discrimination from fund providers. Therefore, when the barriers above are dealt with, the health care provision in Africa can be improved.
References
World Health Organization (2019). Assessment of Barriers to Accessing Health Care in Africa. https://newtabsearch.net/search.php?sub=a9&q=who%20on%20barriers%20of%20healthcare%20access%20in%20africa&orig=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.afro.who.int%2Fpublications%2Fassessment-barriers-accessing-health-services-disadvantaged-adolescents-nigeria