Abstract:
Corruption is a concern in all sectors of the economy,and it is a critical problem in the health sector.Nevertheless, there is little empirical evidence which shows the way corruption affects the quality ofhealth services.The main objective of this study was to determine the perceived effect of corruption on the quality of public health services.The study was conducted in Mbeya Urban District and it adopted a cross-sectional research design. Quantitative and qualitative and data were collected using individual surveysandkey informant interviews,respectively. A random sample of 180 individuals of which 91 (50.6%) were male and 89 (49.4%) were female was involved.Quantitative data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences.A Mann Whitney U test was used to compare between perceptions of corruption andrespondents’ characteristics. In addition, the same test was used to compare between the effect of corruption on quality of health services andrespondents’ characteristics.The results show thatthe overall corruption was perceived as an unfavourable phenomenon that negatively affected quality of health services. The results further show that there is relationship between perceptions of corruption andmarital status at 5% level of significance whereby singles perceived higher corruption than the married ones. In addition, a long queue was one of the major factors driving corruption during health services delivery.The result also showed thatthe quality of health services was perceived to be low. Therelationshipbetweenage, wealth status and employment type andperceived quality of health services was statistically significant at 5% and 1% levels of significance. The study concludes thatthe perceived effect of corruption lowers the quality of health services. The study recommends thatit is important to improve quality of health services.Generally, findings of the study shed light on the need for further research about the perceived effect of corruption on communication between clients’ and health services providers.
