Dissatisfaction with local medical services for middle‐aged and elderly in china: What is relevant?

Abstract

As violent clashes between doctors and patients in China intensify, patient dissatisfaction has been identified as a major concern in the current healthcare reform in China. This study aims to investigate the main determinants of dissatisfaction with local medical services attributable to middle‐aged and elderly characteristics and identify areas for improvement. A total of 14,263 rural participants and 4898 urban participants were drawn from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study in 2018. Dissatisfaction was measured by two methods: binary outcome (1 = Dissatisfaction; 0 = No) demonstrated the risk of occurring dissatisfaction among various characteristics, and continuous outcome (ranges from score 1 to 5) showed the degree. The mean score of dissatisfaction was 2.73 ± 1.08. Sixteen percent of rural participants and 19% of urban participants reported dissatisfaction with local medical services, respectively. The multilevel analyses demonstrated that participants’ utilization of paid family doctor services decreased the risk of occurring dissatisfaction; dissatisfaction was less focused on females; having chronic diseases increased the risk of dissatisfaction. This study suggests promotion of family doctor services can effectively reduce middleaged and elderly dissatisfaction with the local medical services. In addition, more attention should be focused on males and middle‐aged and elderly with chronic diseases in order to decrease dissatisfaction.