Moving Patterns of Patients and Its Implication for Regional Unbalance in Health Resources

Abstract

Due to the concern of regional unbalance relating to healthcare resources, the government has set up a plan to expand public healthcare services and a policy to manage the supply of hospital beds. However, it is not clear what standards are needed to measure the degree of unbalance, and to what extent the gap needs to be narrowed. Unlike the previous methodology comparing the proportions of patients who move out from their administrative district to receive medical services, this study examines the inconvenience gap patients experience when they have to move out from their actual living area. The logit and multinomial logit models are employed. The regional unbalance decreases when the degree of movement is measured based on the living area. This result implies that essential standard for achieving regional balance relating to medical services need to be based not on the even distribution of medical resources, but the complications of regional people that require proper medical services.

Keywords

• 환자이동현황(moving patterns of patients)
• 지역적 접근성(geographical accessibility)
• 의료자원 분포(medical resource distribution)