This paper investigates the realities and causes of regional disparities in community-based services that were newly established in line with the 2006 reforms in the nursing care insurance system. Since the new services strengthened the authority of municipalities as compared with traditional nursing care services, the regional participatory activities of service operators were considered to be the reason for regional disparities in traditional nursing care insurance services. This paper also examines this issue from the perspective of policies, ideas, and financial situations of municipalities. After using the Gini coefficient to understand regional disparities in services, we found that there were significant regional disparities in services, all of which were greater than 0.7 with the exception of cohabitation and nursing care to cope with dementia. This is clear when compared with the fact that all traditional nursing care insurance services had disparities of less than 0.5. The reasons for these regional disparities were municipalities without services, comprising mainly small municipalities, and medium-sized municipalities with populations of approximately 10,000-50,000 which have high contentment indexes due to more satisfactory services than those of small municipalities. Compared with traditional nursing care insurance services, an overwhelming majority of municipalities did not have community-based services, which has markedly increased regional disparities in community-based services compared with traditional nursing care insurance services. Because of the concept that municipalities in their position as the closest administrative body to residents should play an important role in community-based services, not only were they able to set facility maintenance targets in nursing care insurance operation plans, which was the role of municipalities with traditional nursing care insurance services, but they were also granted the authority to specify, supervise, and advise service operators. However, very few municipalities were able to exert this authority. Conversely, in many cases municipalities decided not to implement services, and in some cases they did not assent to the principles of national community-based services. Meanwhile, in municipalities that were able to implement services, the result depended greatly on the participatory activities of service operators, such as profit-making corporations or social welfare corporations, as with the case of traditional care insurance services. However, because schemes such as nursing care benefits and staffing were unattractive to service operators, their participation was passive, resulting in an increase in regional disparities in service provision.
CITATION STYLE
Hatakeyama, T. (2012). Reasons for regional disparities in care insurance community-based services. Geographical Review of Japan Series B, 85(1), 22–39. https://doi.org/10.4157/grj.85.22
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