Equity of primary care service delivery for low income "sicker" adults across 10 OECD countries

• Published in: International journal for equity in health 2018-12, Vol.17 (1), p.182-182, Article 182
• Main Authors: Dahrouge, Simone, Hogg, William, Muggah, Elizabeth, Schrecker, Ted
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adults; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Canada; Canada Health Act; Coordination; Cross-Sectional Studies; Europe; Female; Health aspects; Health care; Health care access; Health care disparities; Health care policy; Health equity; Health services; Health Services Accessibility; Healthcare Disparities; High income; Household income; Households; Humans; Income; Income inequality; International aspects; Literature reviews; Low income groups; Male; Middle Aged; New Zealand; Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development; Patients; Polls & surveys; Population; Poverty; Primary care; Primary Health Care; Quality; Quality of care; Respondents; Severity of Illness Index; Socioeconomic factors; Statistics; Studies; Surveys and Questionnaires; Telephone surveys; United Kingdom; United States; Working poor
• ISSN: 1475-9276; 1475-9276
• DOI: 10.1186/s12939-018-0892-z

Despite significant investments to support primary care internationally, income-based inequities in access to quality health care are present in many high-income countries. This study aims to determine whether low- and middle-income groups are more likely to report poor quality of primary care (PC) than high-income groups cross-nationally. The 2011 Commonwealth Fund Telephone Survey of Sicker Adults is a cross-sectional study across eleven countries. Respondents were recruited from randomly selected households. We used data from surveys conducted in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We identified all questions relating to primary care performance, and categorized these into five dimensions: 1) access to care, 2) coordination 3) patient-centered care, and 4) technical quality of care. We used logistic regression with low and middle-income as the comparison groups and high-income as the referent. Fourteen thousand two hundred sixty-two respondents provided income data. Countries varied considerably in their extent of income disparity. Overall, 24.7% were categorized as low- and 13.9% as high-income. The odds of reporting poor access to care were higher for low- and middle-income than high-income respondents in Canada, New Zealand and the US. Similar results were found for Sweden and Norway on coordination; the opposite trend favoring the low- and middle-income groups was found in New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States. The odds of reporting poor patient-centered care were higher for low-income than high-income respondents in the Netherlands, Norway, and the US; in Australia, this was true for low- and middle-income respondents. On technical quality of care, the odds of reporting poor care were higher for the low- and middle-income comparisons in Canada and Norway; in Germany, the odds were higher for low-income respondents only. The odds of reporting poor technical quality of care were higher for high-income than low-income respondents in the Netherlands. Inequities in quality PC for low and middle income groups exist on at least one dimension in all countries, including some that in theory provide universal access. More research is needed to fully understand equity in the PC sector.