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Comparability of Health Care Responsiveness in Europe

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to measure and to correct for the potential incomparability of responses to the SHARE survey on health care responsiveness. A parametric approach based on the use of anchoring vignettes is applied to cross-sectional data (2006–2007) in eleven European countries. More than 7,000 respondents aged 50 years old and over were asked to assess the quality of health care responsiveness in three domains: waiting time for medical treatment, quality of the conditions in visited health facilities, and communication and involvement in decisions about the treatment. Our results suggest that there is reporting heterogeneity across countries and across individuals within countries, and the degree of heterogeneity varies with the health care domain. Although leading countries in terms of health care responsiveness remain among the most successful even after correction for reporting heterogeneity, one may acknowledge many shifts in the ranking of the other countries.

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Notes

  1. For further details, cf. Börsch-Supan and Jurges (2005) and www.share-project.org.

  2. For instance, “In many countries, it takes time before people can see a specialist and there are waiting lists for certain procedures. Overall, in your situation, how would you rate the amount of time you have to wait for medical treatment?” Or, “Overall, how would you rate the conditions of the health facilities you have visited?” and “Overall, how would you rate how clearly doctors and nurses communicate with you and involve you in decisions about the treatment?”.

  3. Program file (.do) available upon request. In the interests of brevity and to conserve space, standard errors are not reported here. More detailed tables are available from the authors upon request.

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Acknowledgments

This study is part of the COMPARE project. “This paper uses data from SHARE release 2.3.0, as of November 13th 2009. SHARE data collection in 2004-2007 was primarily funded by the European Commission through its 5th and 6th framework programmes (project numbers QLK6-CT-2001-00360; RII-CT-2006-062193; CIT5-CT-2005-028857). Additional funding by the US National Institute on Aging (grant numbers U01 AG09740-13S2; P01 AG005842; P01 AG08291; P30 AG12815; Y1-AG-4553-01; OGHA 04-064; R21 AG025169) as well as by various national sources is gratefully acknowledged (see http://www.share-project.org for a full list of funding institutions).” The authors would like to thank Arthur van Soest, Theresa Bago d’Uva, Silvana Robone, Hendrick Jürges, Renske Kok, and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper.

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Correspondence to Nicolas Sirven.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4, 5, 6 and 7 are given below.

Table 4 Sample Description
Table 5 Thresholds equations for ‘Time to wait for medical treatment’
Table 6 Thresholds equations for ‘Conditions of the health facilities’
Table 7 Thresholds equations for ‘Communication with doctors’

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Sirven, N., Santos-Eggimann, B. & Spagnoli, J. Comparability of Health Care Responsiveness in Europe. Soc Indic Res 105, 255–271 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9880-z

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