Medpedia Podcast. Apps Newsletter Abo-Shop. Springer Medizin. Suche Suchbegriffe eingeben Suchen. International Journal for Equity in Health. Abstract Objectives To assess an association of Socio-economic status with utilization of health care services between years and in Israel.
Methods We retrospectively analyzed the utilization of health care services in a cohort of , members, 21 years and older, of a Clalit Health Services. Data included: Charlson Score morbidity factor, utilization of health care services visits to primary physicians and specialists, purchase of pharmaceuticals, number of hospitalization days, visits to ED, utilization of laboratory tests and imaging.
People with higher SES visited more specialists, bought more prescription drugs and used more medical imaging. The associations between SES and most of the services we analyzed did not change between and However, the gap between lower and higher SES levels in ED visits and the use of prescription drugs slightly increased over time, while the gap in visits to specialists decreased.
Conclusions The research shows that even in a universal health care system SES is associated with utilization of health care services. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article doi: Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
ND participated in the design of the study, in the analysis of results and in writing the discussion. LN participated in the design of the study and performed the statistical analysis and contributed to the discussion.
