Background: Patients with long-term conditions(LTCs) could face major challenges while using available healthcare. This study assessed health care system hassles encountered by patients with LTCs who accessed care at a tertiary hospital.

Methods: This descriptive, cross-sectional, study involved 500 patients with long-term communicable and non-communicable conditions, who seek regular care at the specialist outpatient clinic.  Respondents were selected by stratified random sampling and administered the 16-item Perchman’s hassles scale with each item coded on a 4-point response scale  which was transformed to metrics of 0 to 100. Descriptive and inferential analyses were done using SPSS version 22 and P-values <0.05 were considered significant.

Results: Response rate was 89.2% and scale showed high internal consistency with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.88. More of the respondents were aged 40 – 60 years (46.6%), female (54.5%), married (62.1%), in paid employment (75.8%) ,visiting for non-communicable LTCs (65.2%). The most severe hassles interference of medical appointments with patients’ usual work (68.9), side effects of medications (67.7) and long waiting time for laboratory investigations (61.1).The least were attitude of health workers to patients’ concerns (25.7) and uncertainty about how medications should be taken (29.1). Patients’ with better perceived health status, shorter length of treatment for LTC, single long-term morbidity and those on free treatment fared significantly better.

Conclusion: The findings on the key healthcare hassles faced by patients with LTC calls for the redesign of the healthcare system to ameliorate the difficulties faced by patients with LTC.

Keywords: Long-term morbidities, health care hassles, communicable diseases, non-communicable diseases, UPTH.

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Ibemorah, N.J.

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