Browsing by Author "Nguyen, Hang"

Background: Finland’s health care system has been internationally recognized. However, the issue of inequity in access to health care services has been an ongoing matter in recent years. The labor status is said to have an important impact on the level of physician visits. This thesis aims to examine the potential differences in physician visits among four groups in the structure of the labor market. Methods: The data was a postal survey in 2003 and was attracted from the Health and Social Support Project (HeSSup). Visits to physicians in public health care, occupational health care, and private health services during 12 months were used as indicators of service utilization. Respondents were categorized as employees who were full time employed, part time employed and those who experiencing short term and long term unemployment.Binary logistic regression was used to obtain odds ratio to examine for the differences in doctor visits among these groups of employees. Results: Full time participants visited a physician in occupational health care most often, whereas long term unemployed respondents had physician visits most often in public health care. An analysis based on labor market status showed that the lowest odds ratio in occupational health care for the unemployed and in particular among the long term unemployed (OR 0.368, 95% CI 0.247 – 0.547). Conclusion: The use of physician services varies based on labor market status. It is relative high among the full time employed and it is relatively low among the unemployed. The main reason for this variance lies in the existence of the three different pathways of the Finnish health care system.