Proximity to healthcare centres and service use: The case of Community Clinics in Bangladesh

Abstract

We investigate how distance from healthcare centres affects service utilization for women and children. Relying on five rounds of recent nationally representative demographic and health survey data from Bangladesh, our logistic regression analyses reveal that proximity to healthcare centres barely affects the utilization of healthcare services for women and children, even in rural areas. Interestingly, this indicates that the government's preferred Community Clinics have not significantly contributed to the country's uptake of healthcare services. The low-service utilization may result from their poor standard at the local health centres indicating that improving the service quality can help Bangladesh raise the uptake of healthcare services.