Suchergebnisse

BACKGROUND: While the elderly are facing greater health risks, they also face more serious inequalities in utilization of medical services. The family doctor contracted service is the core policy of the Chinese government to cope with aging and to achieve the outcome that everyone has the right to primary health care. However, previous research has neither revealed the degree of inequality in the use of contracted services among the elderly in China, nor has it revealed what factors are related to the inequality in the use of services. OBJECTIVE: Assess and decompose the inequality in the use of family doctors contracted services in the elderly population in China. METHODS: A cross-sectional study of 1037 elderly people was conducted in Shandong Province, China. According to the first consultation rate of family doctors, the physical examination rate, the healthy lifestyle guidance rate and the chronic disease management rate, the situation of elderly people's utilization of family doctor contracted service was investigated. The concentration index is used to measure the degree of inequality in the use of family doctors contracted services by the elderly. In order to test the contribution of different factors to the inequality of utilization of family doctors contracted services, the concentration index was also decomposed. RESULTS: The first consultation rate of family doctors for the elderly in Shandong Province was 24.6%, the physical examination rate was 65.8%, the healthy lifestyle guidance rate was 13.7%, and the chronic disease management rate was 52.2%. The horizontal inequality index of the healthy lifestyle guidance rate and the chronic disease management rate were 0.451 and 0.573, respectively, indicating that there is an inequality of pro-wealth. The concentration index of physical examination rate and chronic disease management rate is negative (− 0.260, − 0.518), which means inequality to the poor. Education level is the most important factor affecting the unequal utilization of health services for ...

Although an increasing number of scholars are evaluating rail transit benefits, there have been surprisingly few studies of the links between metro proximity and happiness. The principal objective of this paper is to assess the benefits of metro proximity for individual's happiness. A key challenge to empirically answering this question is the fact that residential location is likely to be the result of self-selection, i.e., personal preference, such that living around a rail station can increase residents' happiness. Taking advantage of the largely exogenous residential locations of those who bought their house 10 years earlier than the operation of their nearest metro station and those households living in non-market housing in Shanghai, we find proximity to a subway station robustly promotes happiness at the individual level. These results suggest that the development of rail transit and transit-oriented development (TOD) are promising ways to increase happiness.