Indian Journal of Human Development, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2014 Non-Hospitalisation Care in West Bengal: A Demand-Side Assessment Montu Bose* , Arijita Dutta** With several system-level changes introduced in low and middle income countries in recent years, access to non-hospitalised health care is crucial for any developing country, lack of which can be taken as the ‘unmet demand’ for health care in general. This study, based on NSS unit level data on morbidity and health care for 60 th Round shows that income, education and gender appeared to be the three most important barriers to access non-hospitalised health care in West Bengal, a highly populous state of India. The inter- sectional analysis brings out the importance of both inter-household and intra-household factors in influencing access to medical facilities in rural, as well as urban West Bengal. Using socio-economic ordering of inter-sectional classes, the gender discrimination becomes clear not only within the same income class, but cuts across income strata. Education has come out as an important determinant of access to health care. However, the access probability is higher in urban areas than in rural, in all income classes across gender. The preference for private providers among better off and more educated classes hints towards a perceived low quality of services in public sector. The analysis presented here is expected to indicate important directions for designing more effective promotional policies to guarantee better access to health care by all sections of the society. Keywords: Access to health care, Barriers to access, Health Equity, Logit regression, Inter-sectional analysis. INTRODUCTION It has been an issue of debate now whether the recent reforms in economic as well as health care policies, coupled with the wave of globalisation and privatisation, have been successful in improving access to public health care. With several system-level changes introduced in low- and middle-income countries, access to non-hospitalised health care has become crucial to measure the availability of health services for any developing country. Lack of it can be taken as the ‘unmet demand’ for health care in general. There are several options available for an individual to choose for the non- hospitalisation care from: public, private institutionalised, private non- institutionalised. Access to health care is defined as the potential and actual entry of a * Research Scholar, Department of Economics, University of Calcutta. Email: monbose@gmail.com. ** Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Calcutta; Visiting Researcher, UNU Merit, The Netherlands. Email: dutta.arijita@gmail.com.