Perceived quality of healthcare provided by patent medicine vendors in rural and remote communities of low- and medium-Income countries (LMICs): A perspective from Nigeria

Perceived quality of healthcare is a strong predictor of continuous utilization of healthcare. There is dearth of current evidence on the perception of the quality of the healthcare received from patent medicine vendors (PMVs) in low-and medium-income countries (LMICs). This study, therefore, through the lens of hard-to-reach communities in Nigeria seeks to assess the perception of the quality of healthcare provided by PMVs as well its determinants. It was a cross-sectional study of 339 residents of 20 purposively selected rural and remote villages conducted between January and May, 2022 in Jigawa State, Nigeria. We adapted, digitized, and used the interviewer-administered questionnaire on laypeople’s perception of the quality of primary care to collect the data for the study. Data were analysed with the Stata version 16 and statistical significance was determined at P<0.05. We found that 62.5% of the rural and remote community dwellers that were studied perceived poor quality of healthcare services provided by the PMVs. Participants who were older than 44 years, are of the Hausa tribe and have health insurance coverage were more likely to perceive good quality care compared to others. The findings highlight that while many dwellers of rural and remote communities receive healthcare services from PMVs, they perceive the quality of care they receive to be poor. This could potentially limit the success of any proposed expansion of more basic health services to the PMVs in rural and remote communities.