The Influence Of Access on the Use of Specialists Health Care in Norway

• Main Author: Lafkiri, Khalid
• Other Authors: Professor Tor Iversen
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: VDP::806; Norway; Finnmark; Northern Norway
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10852/30385; http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-25218

This paper studies the extent to which the principle of “equal access” and “equal use for equal need” is maintained in the specialist health care delivery system of Norway. We include three types of specialist health care services: hospital inpatient stay, hospital outpatient visit and private specialist visit. We investigate inequality in access with accessibility indices that combine rich information on the capacity of specialist health care and the distance from residence to the hospital and private specialist care. We investigate inequity in the use of specialist health care with data from the 2008 Survey of Living Conditions linked with data on access to specialist health care (accessibility indices). We find inequality of access to specialist health care revealing that the capital Oslo has the best access to specialist health care and the residents of northern Norway (Finnmark county) has the worst access. Moreover, we find inequities in use of hospital inpatient stay with respect to ethnicity and education, in use of hospital outpatient visit with respect to education and access to private specialist and in use of private specialist visit with respect to education, household income and the access to private specialists. We find that the better access to private specialists is, the higher is the probability of visit to a private specialist. Regarding hospital outpatient we find that the better access to private specialists is, the lower is the probability of a visit to hospital outpatient clinic. This suggests that the use of a hospital outpatient visit is a possible substitute for private specialists. We consider this study to be helpful in identifying how equitable specialized health care are distributed and in developing future health policies.