A research group led by Associate Professor Atsushi Kaneko of the Graduate School of Data Science, Yokohama City University, has developed a scale that expresses the remoteness of Japanese medical care on a 100-point scale.Using this scale makes it possible to visualize the characteristics of medical care, and is expected to lead to the resolution of regional issues.
According to Yokohama City University, the research group used the results of research from other countries, the opinions of domestic medical experts in remote areas, and the results of questionnaires to government officials and medical personnel involved in medical care in remote areas. A method was developed to classify areas from the most urbanized scale of 4 to the most isolated scale of 1 by combining four items: distance to a tertiary emergency hospital, isolated islands, and areas of special heavy snowfall.
The remoteness of each area can be calculated for each postal code, municipality, and secondary medical area.When we actually calculated the results, we found that there was a medium negative correlation with the doctor maldistribution index, which indicates the degree of maldistribution of doctors in each secondary medical area, and a negative correlation with the average life expectancy.
The disparity in health and medical resources between rural and urban areas has become a global issue.There are countries overseas that have established their own scales to indicate the degree of walledness, but in Japan there is no scale to express the degree of remoteness, despite the population of about 1,100 million and 58% of the country being in isolated areas. rice field.There were only two or three levels of administrative divisions, such as depopulated areas and areas with no doctors, which was not enough to indicate remoteness.
Paper information:[BMJ Open] Development and validation of a rurality index for health care research in Japan: A modified Delphi study
