Participants and study areas
The study used a case study approach, using primarily qualitative
methods. The period of data collection and analysis was October
2012–June 2013. Two provinces in the western region, Ranong and
Tak, were selected for the study as they represented areas with the
first and the second highest proportion of stateless people, constituting
about one-fifth of the stateless people in Thailand. Consultative
meetings between the research team and senior public health officers
of the MOPH and the NHSO were arranged by the Health
Insurance Systems Research Office, Thailand, in August 2012 and
March 2013. These meetings enabled the research team to obtain
advice from public health experts on participant selection and data
analysis. Thirty healthcare providers were purposively sampled for
either individual or group interviews, in order to capture a wide
range of responsibilities at all levels of care, including executive staff
in the local health facilities (in this case, the provincial chief medical
officer and hospital directors), frontline healthcare providers, administrative
staff who were responsible for the insurance budget
management and community health workers. Additional respondents
were recruited through snowball sampling until data saturation
was reached. The interviews took place at the provincial health office,
the provincial hospital, the district hospital with a large number
of stateless patients, and 2–4 subdistrict health centres.
Furthermore, three officers in the MOPH (middle to senior level)
were interviewed in order to explore the perspectives of central
authorities. General attributes of the respondents and codes are displayed
in Supplementary file S1.