An Assessment of Care-Seeking Behavior in Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa District: A Triple Pluralistic Health Sector Approach

What is it about?

This paper explores health seeking behaviour in Ghana's Pluralistic health care environment with self-care as a third option. Researchers often describe Ghana's health care system as a two-sector system - Biomedicine (Western Medicine) and Traditional Medicine. In this paper, I present an argument for the need to include self-care to the pluralistic health system discourse and adopt Kleinman's (1978) triple-sector approach. I then apply this approach to examine health seeking behaviour of residents in the Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa District. I also distinguish actual health seeking behaviour from preferred health seeking behaviour. The findings of the study shows that respondents generally self-medicate, however, the majority prefer the use of biomedical services compared to self-care and commercial traditional healing practices.

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Why is it important?

This paper considers the change in Ghana's biomedical and traditional health care practices. It factors in these changes to model a three-sector model of pluralistic health care in Ghana. The model is an adaptation of Kleinman's 1978 model on the internal structures of a pluralistic health society. In the study, I modified Kleinman's model to reflect Ghana's pluralistic health care environment, given the former's model was based on the Chinese health care system.

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