Out-of-pocket health expenditures of Psychiatry Patients in Dokuz Eylul University hospital

Introduction: The aim of this study is to define the out-of-pocket (OoP) health expenditures and its determinants among psychiatric patients in Dokuz Eylul University (DEU) Hospital in Turkey. Method: The study group of this cross-sectional study are the patients who admitted to the DEU Psychiatry Clinic during June 2014 with the diagnosis of 'psycosis, bipolar disorder and anxiety'. Dependent variable is OoP payments for prescription, diagnostic tests and examinations. Independent variables are age, gender, marrital status, education level, occupational class, health insurance, private insurance, income and the source for paying the costs. Students t test, Mann Whitney U test, Kolmogrov Smirnov, Correlation, Linear Regression, Analysis of Variance, and Logistic Regression is used for statistical analysis. Findings: One hundred and ninety one patients were interviewed. The mean OoP payment per month was 6.7$. Mean Oop payment for examination was 2.8$, for prescription 2.2$, for laboratory 1.6$. Total OoP payments were highly consisted of examination payments (43%), second medicine (33%) and last laboratory payments (24%). There was significant difference in OoP payments according to diagnosis. OoP payments of people without health insurance and people who used debit for payments were significantly higher than others. Conclusion: It can be seen that examination and medicine payments are important for OoP payments. Therefore, these payments should be cancelled. In addition all the pschiatric patients should be covered with total health insurance and further follow up studies should be conducted for these patients. Key words: Out-of-pocket payment, health expenditures, health insurance, psychiatric patients