Measurement of unmet healthcare needs to assess progress on universal health coverage - exploring a novel approach based on household surveys

BACKGROUND: Universal Health Coverage (UHC) aims to ensure universal access to quality healthcare according to health needs. The extent to which population health needs are met should be a key measure for progress on UHC. The indicators in use for measuring access mostly relate to physical accessibility or insurance coverage. Or, utilization of services is taken as indirect measure for access but it is assessed against only the perceived healthcare needs. The unperceived needs do not get taken into account. The present study was aimed at demonstrating an approach for measuring the unmet healthcare needs using household survey data as an additional measure of UHC. METHODS: A household survey was conducted in Chhattisgarh state of India, covering a multi-stage sample of 3153 individuals. Healthcare need was measured in terms of perceived needs which would be self-reported and unperceived needs where clinical measurement supplemented the interview response. Estimation of unperceived healthcare needs was limited to three tracer conditions- hypertension, diabetes and depression. Multivariate analysis was conducted to find the determinants of the various measures of the perceived and unperceived needs. RESULTS: Of the surveyed individuals, 10.47% reported perceived healthcare needs for acute ailments in the last 15 days. 10.62% individuals self-reported suffering from chronic conditions. 12.75% of those with acute ailment and 18.40% with chronic ailments received no treatment, while 27.83% and 9.07% respectively received treatment from unqualified providers. On an average, patients with chronic ailments received only half the medication doses required annually. The latent need was very high for chronic ailments. 47.42% of individuals above 30 years age never had blood pressure measured. 95% of those identified with likelihood of depression had not sought any healthcare and they did not know they could be suffering from depression. CONCLUSION: To assess progress on UHC more meaningfully, better methods are needed to measure unmet healthcare needs, taking into account both the perceived and unperceived needs, as well as incomplete care and inappropriate care. Appropriately designed household surveys offer a significant potential to allow its periodic measurement. Their limitations in measuring the ‘inappropriate care’ may necessitate supplementation with qualitative methods. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-023-09542-0.