Wiener Gesundheits- und Sozialsurvey Vienna Health and Social ...

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
percent) among the people who have not visited a dentist
at all during the past five years. The number of people
who go for check-ups increases with the level of education,
as well as with a person’s professional status. Those
in higher positions reported to have visited a dentist five
times or more, while unqualified men and women did so
conspicuously less frequently.
38
Priority Measures
General Health Situation
To describe the general health situation of people in Vienna,
we distinguished between subjective health, including
amongst others a person’s mental condition and
quality of life, and objective health as the sum total of a
person’s ailments and diseases. By ”objective health” we
mean self-objectified accounts of ailments and diseases.
”Subjective health” includes the following variables: satisfaction
with state of health, subjective assessment of
state of health on a scale of 1 to 100, subjective physical
condition, ”feeling fit”, daytime stress, well-being in the
evening.
More than 80 percent of people are very or fairly content
with their own state of health right into old age.
People aged 74 and above are noticeably less so, only 75
percent of men and 66 percent of women in that age
group claim to be satisfied with their state of health.
While satisfaction rates are generally high, contentedness
still rises considerably with the level of income.
Subjective health is rated highest among young people
and continuously drops with increasing age. Well-being
in the evenings, on the other hand, increases with age.
People with the lowest income and educational level as
well as people engaged in unskilled activities are least
satisfied with their health and well-being in the evenings.
On the whole, health relevant behaviour, too, is largely
dependent on the social gradient. Health relevant behaviour
did not appear well-structured and was thus quite
difficult to predict. Variances in physical activity were
best explained with the help of social and individual resources.
Education seems to be a vital prerequisite for
positive health behaviour.
● Resort to socio-cultural resources to promote an active life-style and to encourage purposeful activities
● Increase social competencies as well as capacity to act
● Promote enjoyment and moderation with food, alcohol and nicotine consumption
● Promote sensible use of medication
● Offer gender-oriented health promotion services
● Offer health services tailored to the needs of different social groups
● Facilitate access to education and counselling
As for the other subjective health indicators, i.e. subjective
physical condition, ”feeling fit”, and well-being in
the evenings, they also depend on social resources, such
as income, education and professional situation, as do
”subjective health assessment” and satisfaction with
state of health. ”Daytime stress” alone seems to deviate
from this pattern. This is easily explained by the fact that
subjectively felt stress not only depends on a person’s capacity
to deal with stress but also to a large extent on
that person’s circumstances of life. Stress frequency
drops significantly with retirement, it is more strongly
felt by people of the highest income, education or career
level and less so by people in lower positions.
Of all resources examined, income has the greatest influence
on subjective health. Threshold value behaviour,
i.e. a ”saturation effect”, is displayed by all of them,
which means that health noticeably improves up until
the second to last category and only slightly so from
there on. A further increase in income or education thus
has very little effect on a person’s health. Consequently,
an adequate supply of external resources at the threshold
level would suffice to ensure adequate health for everyone.
Threshold value relations are quite common in
socio-epidemiological calculations of life expectancy. In
countries which have already reached a certain GNP
(gross national product) level, an increase in life expectancy
is rarely due to an increase in GNP . Below that
WIENER GESUNDHEITS- UND SOZIALSURVEY