Access to Healthcare: Issues of Measure and Method

Copyright: © 2013 Regmi K, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Health services are much improved in terms of results: people now live longer and are treated faster, healthcare institutions have advanced and professionals specialise in treating patients’ conditions, and in general healthcare practices are evidence-informed and are implemented through evidence-based practice. Access to health care has been an important dimension in public health policy in many healthcare settings. As Aday and Anderson [1](p.4) discuss, access to healthcare from equity perspectives should fulfil three assumptions: first, this is a fundamental right to healthcare; second, health resources [3Ms : minute (time), manpower, materials] are always limited; and third, health policy should be evidence-based in practice. One argument behind such assumptions is that the ‘modern healthcare system may in fact be ineffectual or even deleterious in effecting health in patients who use it’ [2, 3].