IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v29y1989i2p185-193.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Self-care within a model for demand for medical care

Author

Listed:
  • Bentzen, Niels
  • Christiansen, Terkel
  • Pedersen, Kjeld Møller

Abstract

Self-care is interpreted from a health economic point of view. Various approaches are presented. It is stressed that the decision-oriented approach used by other health service researchers is an integral part of the economic approach to the topic as is the idea of a continuum of care, from self-care to professional care. A new approach is taken to the modeling of self-care, in that self-care becomes part of a four-part demand for care model. This makes it possible to model the demand for care for three different groups separately: 1--persons with zero episodes; 2--persons with pure illness episodes and illness episodes with self-care; 3--persons with episodes involving professional care or professional care combined with self-care. Another contribution is due to the so-called episodic approach to the demand for care. The natural counting units are illness and treatment episodes, i.e. instead of counting for instance number of times a general practitioner is consulted we ought to count the number of episodes involving professional care, self-care or both types of care. The episodic approach seems to be well suited for work with self-care. The empirical part is based on a unique Danish panel study using health diaries returned weekly. Data from 27 of the 52 reporting weeks are used, involving more than 14,000 episodes distributed across about 2800 persons belonging to about 1000 households. The use of health diaries seems to be very well suited to the study of self-care in that less salient events and activities than professional care are picked up far better in prospective health diary studies than in restrospective questionnaire based surveys. Descriptive and regression (logistic and ordinary) results are presented.

Suggested Citation

  • Bentzen, Niels & Christiansen, Terkel & Pedersen, Kjeld Møller, 1989. "Self-care within a model for demand for medical care," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 29(2), pages 185-193, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:29:y:1989:i:2:p:185-193
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(89)90166-4
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anne Rogers & Gerry Nicolaas, 1998. "Understanding the Patterns and Processes of Primary Care Use: A Combined Quantitative and Qualitative Approach," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 3(4), pages 1-13, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:29:y:1989:i:2:p:185-193. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.