| Abstract: | Background: The National Health Insurance (NHI) is the most important social program in Taiwan in the last century. It provides universal as well as comprehensive healthcare. As a result, the access to care is much improved. To insurer, the appropriate use of various medical services data, such as the incidence of diseases, the frequencies of services used etc. and their variation over the years can be analyzed for health policy planning. However, there were very few studies concerning the utilization of occupational therapy.
Objective: The purpose of the study was to estimate the utilization of occupational therapy among insured according to gender, age, health insurance branch, etc. and their trend from 1997 to 2006.
Material and Methods: The study was a repeated cross-sectional study. The source of data of the individual characters and the services of occupational therapy were came from the claimed data of first to fifth set of sampled registry of beneficiaries of National Health Insurance from 1996 to 2006. In addition to calculate the utilization of occupational therapy from 1997 to 2006, we used the two-part model to analysis the effect of those socio-economic variables on the utilization of occupational therapy. We used SPSS14.0 as well as Microsoft Excel 2007 for the data processing and the statistic analysis.
Results and Conclusion: The utilization of occupational therapy in from 0.31% in 1997 raised to to 0.92% in 2006. The average annual growth rate of those 10 years is 11.49%. With regard the gender, the male utilization rate increased 0.37% to 0.91% with an average annual growth rate of 11.31%, female utilization rate raised from 0.26% to 1.08% with an average annual growth rate of 11.18%. With regard to age, the elderly and those around ten years old, the average annual growth rate is relatively high (16.72%-20.17%). With regard to the brunch bureaus, all of them the average annual growth rate were 9.66% to 14.26%, with the Kao-Ping Branch had the highest growth rate.The results of this study show those variables with stable impact on utilization (a row indicates significant effects in several years and with the same positive and negative trends): gender, age, major injuries and occupational disease. Other factors such as chronic disease, insured salary, low-income households, health insurance branch, physician population ratio, occupational therapists population ratio were significant on utilization only among part of those 10 years. |
