Health Policy Manag.
2020 Mar;30(1):37-49. 10.4332/KJHPA.2020.30.1.37.
Critical Analysis of Unmet Healthcare Needs Index for Addressing Regional Healthcare Inequality
- Affiliations
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- 1Institute of Health and Environment, Graduate School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
- 2Department of Public Health Sciences, Graduate School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
- 3Department of Health Policy and Management, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea
- 4People’s Health Institute, Seoul, Korea
- KMID: 2507257
- DOI: http://doi.org/10.4332/KJHPA.2020.30.1.37
Abstract
- Background
Unmet healthcare needs have many advantages for measuring inequalities in healthcare use. However, the existing indicator is difficult to capture the reality of unmet healthcare needs sufficiently and is not quite appropriate in comparing regional inequality. The purpose of this study is to critically analyze the utilization of the unmet healthcare need indicator for regional healthcare inequalities research.
Methods
We used the level of healthcare accessibility and healthcare need to categorize the regions that are known to cause differences in healthcare utilization between regions and verified how existing unmet healthcare need indicator is distributed at the regional level.
Results
Four types of regions were classified according to the high and low levels of healthcare needs and accessibility. The hypothesis about the regional type expected to have the highest unmet healthcare need was not proved. The hypothesis about the lowest expected regional type was proved, but the difference in the average rate of unmet healthcare needs among regional types was not significant. The standard deviation of the rate of unmet healthcare needs among regions within the same type was also higher than the overall regional variation, which also disproved the whole frame of hypothesis.
Conclusion
Failure to prove the hypothesis means the gap between the supposed meaning of the indicator and the reality. In order to understand the current state of healthcare utilization of people in various regions of Korea and to resolve inequality, fundamental research on the in-depth structure and mechanisms of healthcare utilization is needed.
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