BACKGROUND The more diseases one suffers from, the higher the number of health care services attended. This study aims to examine the role this association plays in socio-economic differences in multiple health care utilization. METHODS The study population derived from the Netherlands Health Interview Surveys (1990-1998) and was 25 years or older (N=53,339). Socio-economic position was indic...

BACKGROUND This population-based study examined the relative and combined relationships of chronic medical illness (CMI) and depressive symptoms with health care utilization among older adults in South Korea. METHODS A nationally representative sample of 3224 older adults participating in the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (KLoSA) were categorized into four groups based on clinical chara...

BACKGROUND Equitable utilization of health care is a primary goal of the Chinese health system. This study aimed to examine horizontal inequity in health care utilization and identify the factors resulting in inequity among the middle-aged and elderly in China. METHODS The data were obtained from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). We employed the concentration index ...

Most data sets indicate a positive correlation between having health insurance and utilizing health care services. Yet the direction of causality is not at all clear. If we observe a positive correlation between the utilization of health care services and insurance status, we do not know if this is because people who anticipate poor health buy more insurance (or take jobs with generous medical ...

OBJECTIVES To describe patterns in physician and hospital utilization among rural and urban populations in China and to determine factors associated with any differences. METHODS In 2003, the Third National Health Services Survey in China was conducted to collect information about health services utilization from randomly selected residents. Of the 193,689 respondents to the survey (response ...

Analytical techniques Age-standardized cross-tabulations were used to compare health status, heath behaviours, and health care utilization between the off-reserve Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations. Multiple logistic regression was used to determine if, after adjustment for socio-demographic and health behaviour factors, the Aboriginal population had greater odds of reporting selected he...

INTRODUCTION Self-assessed health (SAH) is a frequently used measure of individuals' health status. It is also prone to reporting heterogeneity. To control for reporting heterogeneity objective measures of true health need to be included in an analysis. The topic becomes even more complex for cross-country comparisons, as many key variables tend to vary strongly across countries, influenced by ...

Linking at-risk callers to ongoing mental health care is a key goal of crisis hotline interventions that has not often been addressed in evaluations of hotlines' effectiveness. We conducted telephone interviews with 376 suicidal and 278 nonsuicidal crisis callers to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (Lifeline) to assess rates of mental health care utilization following Lifeline calls and...

Opinion-based questionnaires on Likert scales are commonly used in assessing health care utilization, facilitating factors and barriers. There is a need to set up a cut-off point in them to arrive at a conclusion. It is also important to set up a cut-off point on overall items in Likert scalebased questionnaires used for assessing Knowledge, Attitude and Practice. In this article, we show how t...