Model to assess workload of village doctors in the National Essential Public Health Services Program in six provinces of
- PDF / 594,707 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 79 Downloads / 162 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Model to assess workload of village doctors in the National Essential Public Health Services Program in six provinces of China Delu Yin1,2* , Tao Yin1, Huiming Yang1, Lihong Wang1 and Bowen Chen1*
Abstract Background: No studies, particularly quantitative analyses, have been conducted regarding the workload of village doctors in the National Essential Public Health Services (NEPHS) program and differences in service delivery by village doctors, according to region and services. In this study, we developed a quantitative analysis approach to measure the workload of NEPHS provided by village doctors in six provinces of China in 2016. We aimed to identify areas and services of the NEPHS needing improvement, so as to implement targeted measures to ensure adequate delivery of NEPHSs in rural remote underserved areas. Methods: Based on survey data from 300 town hospital centers (THCs) located in 60 counties in the six selected provinces, we calculated village doctors’ share of workload under the NEPHS using the equivalent value (EV) model. To define the workload and corresponding EV of each NEPHS, a series of five meetings was held with THC managers, public health workers, family physicians, nurses and village doctors. Field observations were conducted to verify the workload and EV of each service. Results: Village doctors’ share of the workload under the NEPHS program was 43.71% across the 300 sampled THCs in six provinces. The village doctors’ workload shares for different NEPHS ranged from 17.14 to 57.00%. The percentage workload undertaken by village doctors under the NEPHS program varied across different provinces, with the highest proportion 63.4% and the lowest 28.5%. Conclusions: The total NEPHS workload assigned to village doctors by THCs in the six sampled provinces exceeded the Chinese government’s requirement of 40%, but the workload proportion in some provinces was less than 40%. In addition, the percentage workload for some NEPHS undertaken by village doctors was lower than others. We suggest conducting district-level analysis of the workload among village doctors under the NEPHS program using the EV method, to identify areas and services needing improvement, to implement targeted measures to expand and promote health service provision in China’s rural underserved areas. Keywords: Workload, Village doctors, National Essential Public Health Services program, Equivalent value
* Correspondence: [email protected]; [email protected] 1 Capital Institute of Pediatrics, 2 YaBao Road, #330, ChaoYang District, Beijing 100020, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images
Data Loading...
