Highlights:
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.