Community characteristics that attract physicians in Japan: a cross-sectional analysis of community demographic and econ
- PDF / 207,638 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 610 x 792 pts Page_size
- 26 Downloads / 180 Views
BioMed Central
Open Access
Research
Community characteristics that attract physicians in Japan: a cross-sectional analysis of community demographic and economic factors Masatoshi Matsumoto*1, Kazuo Inoue2, Satomi Noguchi2, Satoshi Toyokawa2 and Eiji Kajii1 Address: 1Division of Community and Family Medicine, Centre for Community Medicine, Jichi Medical University, Tochigi, Japan and 2Department of Public Health, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Email: Masatoshi Matsumoto* - [email protected]; Kazuo Inoue - [email protected]; Satomi Noguchi - [email protected]; Satoshi Toyokawa - [email protected]; Eiji Kajii - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 18 February 2009 Human Resources for Health 2009, 7:12
doi:10.1186/1478-4491-7-12
Received: 18 August 2008 Accepted: 18 February 2009
This article is available from: http://www.human-resources-health.com/content/7/1/12 © 2009 Matsumoto et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: In many countries, there is a surplus of physicians in some communities and a shortage in others. Population size is known to be correlated with the number of physicians in a community, and is conventionally considered to represent the power of communities to attract physicians. However, associations between other demographic/economic variables and the number of physicians in a community have not been fully evaluated. This study seeks other parameters that correlate with the physician population and show which characteristics of a community determine its "attractiveness" to physicians. Methods: Associations between the number of physicians and selected demographic/economic/life-related variables of all of Japan's 3132 municipalities were examined. In order to exclude the confounding effect of community size, correlations between the physician-to-population ratio and other variable-to-population ratios or variable-to-area ratios were evaluated with simple correlation and multiple regression analyses. The equity of physician distribution against each variable was evaluated by the orenz curve and Gini index. Results: Among the 21 variables selected, the service industry workers-to-population ratio (0.543), commercial land price (0.527), sales of goods per person (0.472), and daytime population density (0.451) were better correlated with the physician-to-population ratio than was population density (0.409). Multiple regression analysis showed that the service industry worker-to-population ratio, the daytime population density, and the elderly rate were each independently correlated with the physician-to-population ratio (standardized regression coefficient 0.393, 0.355, 0.089 respectively; each p < 0.001). Equity of physician distribution was higher
Data Loading...
