IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/hepoli/v100y2011i2-3p219-233.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Health care prioritization in ageing societies: Influence of age, education, health literacy and culture

Author

Listed:
  • Mak, Benise
  • Woo, Jean
  • Bowling, Ann
  • Wong, Florens
  • Chau, Pui Hing

Abstract

Objectives To examine how Chinese people in Hong Kong view health care prioritization and to compare the findings with those from a United Kingdom survey.Methods A cross-sectional opinion survey was conducted in Hong Kong and 1512 participants were interviewed.Results Data show that the highest rankings were accorded to "treatment for children" and "high technology services." Services for the elderly, whether in the community or in hospitals, and including end-of-life care, were ranked among the lowest. This view was also shared by healthcare professionals. Compared with the UK findings, there are stark contrasts in the low ranking of end-of-life care and the high ranking of high technology services among the HK population.Conclusions It is evident that most people would give priority to the young over the old in distributing a given amount of healthcare services. To meet the needs of ageing societies and to meet the needs of all users equitably, health care policy needs to acknowledge constraints and the needs for prioritization. Both the public and professionals should engage with policy makers in formulating a policy based on cost benefit considerations as well as overall societal view of prioritization that is not based on age alone.

Suggested Citation

  • Mak, Benise & Woo, Jean & Bowling, Ann & Wong, Florens & Chau, Pui Hing, 2011. "Health care prioritization in ageing societies: Influence of age, education, health literacy and culture," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 100(2-3), pages 219-233, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:100:y:2011:i:2-3:p:219-233
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168-8510(10)00249-6
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jean Woo, 2017. "Designing Fit for Purpose Health and Social Services for Ageing Populations," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 14(5), pages 1-8, April.
    2. Dorte Gyrd‐Hansen, 2018. "Is there additional value attached to health gains at the end of life? A revisit," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(1), pages 71-75, January.
    3. Gill, Betty & Griffin, Barbara & Hesketh, Beryl, 2013. "Changing expectations concerning life-extending treatment: The relevance of opportunity cost," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 85(C), pages 66-73.
    4. Palumbo, Rocco & Annarumma, Carmela & Adinolfi, Paola & Musella, Marco & Piscopo, Gabriella, 2016. "The Italian Health Literacy Project: Insights from the assessment of health literacy skills in Italy," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 120(9), pages 1087-1094.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:100:y:2011:i:2-3:p:219-233. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/healthpol .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.