Highlights:
- At present, there are few researches on the distribution of medical
resources in China as a whole, that is, among provinces.
- In the research path, this paper conducts a comparative analysis from
three aspects of total amount, per capita ownership and high-quality
resources.
- The conclusions obtained are more comprehensive, accurate and
specific.
- In the context of the COVID-19, this study has certain reference and
enlightenment significance for the research related to the balanced
development of global medical resources.
Ethics statement: Ethic
statement - Not applicable
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Nanjing City Vocational
College and Zhejiang Tourism Vocational College for its material and
financial support for this study.
Introduction
In January 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 an
international public health emergency. The emergence and outbreak of
COVID-19 has sounded an alarm bell for the development of medical and
health undertakings in countries around the world. In the face of
large-scale infectious diseases, many countries’ medical resources are
in a state of tension and paralysis1.Therefore, in
areas where medical resources are scarce, patients die because they
cannot be treated in time. A large number of studies have proved that
the number of medical resources (i.e. hospitals, doctors and beds) has
an impact on the mortality of residents. Increasing hospitals, beds and
medical students in underdeveloped western regions can more effectively
alleviate the local mortality2.Therefore, studying the
distribution and difference of medical resources among provinces in a
country is conducive to understanding the problems in the balance and
fairness of the development of medical and health services, thus
providing some guidance for the government’s medical construction.
In terms of research methods, the common method to study the fairness
and balance of medical resources is to calculate various fairness
indicators, such as the Thiel index, Gini coefficient, etc3+4.But for a country as a whole, to analyze the
differences between provinces, it is also a very intuitive and effective
analysis method to select the corresponding indicators of medical and
health resources for comparative analysis5.
From which aspects should we
evaluate the level of medical resources in the region? Or what data and
indicators are used to reflect the medical resources of a region?Liu HM
and other scholars took China as the research object and uses cartograms
and half-violin plots to visualize the hospital beds per 10,000 people,
medical personnel per 10,000 people and number of 3A hospitals in
China.In this study, the number of hospital beds per 10000 people and
the number of medical personnel per 10000 people in China were used as
the evaluation indicators for the primary health care system, and 3A
hospital was used as the evaluation indicator for high-quality medical
resources6.Sida Wan and other scholars analyzed 369
Chinese cities and constructed a medical resource evaluation model based
on the grading of medical institutions using the Delphi method.”Research
area and data point distribution” divides the types of medical
institutions, including Clinic,First Aid Center,Pharmacy,Specialized
Hospital etc7.Chao Tan and other scholars studied the
relationship between medical resources and the proportion of the elderly
population in China.In the article, they use the number of beds in
hospitals and medical centers to represent ”medical
resources”8.
To sum up, most scholars have some limitations on the evaluation of
medical resources. This paper tries to reflect ”medical resources” as
comprehensively as possible. Therefore, it compares and analyzes the
differences between different provinces in China from three aspects: the
amount of medical resources per capita, the total amount of regional
medical resources, and the total amount of regional high-quality medical
resources.
Research method and data indicators
The research methods and ideas of this paper are shown in Figure 1. The
article reflects the medical resources of each province in China from
three aspects: the total amount of medical resources in the region, the
per capita medical resources in the region, and the high-quality medical
resources in the region.