Utilization of Adult Health Examination and Associated Factors for Chronically Mental Disabilities in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Lo-Ming Yuan, 袁樂民
• Other Authors: 蔡文正
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/n8pm39

碩士 === 中國醫藥大學 === 醫務管理學系碩士班 === 99 === Objectives: Many previous publications discover that serious mental illness patients have high rate mortality which are associated with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, etc. Adult healthy examinations can diagnose chronic diseases at the early stages to reduce the damages and consequences from these diseases. This study is mainly focused on analyzing the utilization status of the Adult Health Examinations by the serious mental illness patients and the general population in the country wide between 2006 and 2008. We further investigated the influence factors of the Adult Health Examination used by mental disability patients. Methods: A total of 65,888 people participated in this study of disabled of serious mental illness, who were registered in the “disabled person file” from the Ministry of Interior in 2008, and the files were merged with both the “preventive health care file” at the Bureaus of Health Promotions and the medical claim databases at the National Health Insurance between 2006 and 2008. This study analyzed the utilization of preventive health care for the mental disabled, and compared with non-disabled people. Besides descriptive statistics and bivariate analysis, this study was examined the factors affecting whether to use the preventive health care with logistic regression analysis. Results: The utilization rate of adult health examination for the mental disabled was 22.32%, but the non-disabled group was 29.96％. In mental disabled, the utilization rate was 22.68% by men and 21.99% in women. The highest utilization rate was applied to people who are between 60 and 64 years old, which was 27.57%. The level six utilization rate of urbanization level was 28.27%. The utilization rate was 31.29% for the low income people and 20.72% for the non-low income people. The utilization rate ranked the highest as 37.07% by the sever degree of disabled patients. Besides cancer patients, patients who suffer from chronic illness had high utilization rate as well. Based on the logistic regression analysis results, the factors affecting whether to use the Adult Health Examinations were age, living area, demographics, economic status, health status, and degree of disability. Conclusion: We concluded that 22.32% mental illness patients above 40 years old joined at the Adult Health Examinations, which was lower than the 29.96% of general populations who participated at the Adult Health Examinations. Regular health examinations can early diagnostic diseases, immediately provide treatment to correct the unhealthy behaviors, and prevent diseases. Therefore, increasing the utilization rates of Adult Health Examinations improves the quality care of the serious mental illness patients.