Web-economic-crisis-health-systems-and-health-web

304 Economic crisis, health systems and health in Europe: country experience
analyses were performed on a representative sample (1254). The first of these
approaches focused on the overall experience of the study population and
found that 15.1% of those surveyed had experienced a situation where they
did not acquire necessary pharmaceuticals and 8.7% reported not attending
a necessary medical consultation, both because of lack of financial resources;
5.0% did not attend a necessary medical consultation because of transportation
costs; while 6.0% did not attend an urgent medical consultation because they
could not afford to lose one day of salary. The second approach focused on
the respondent's last disease occurring between April 2012 and April 2013:
541 respondents (43.6%) reported that they experienced some sort of illness
during this one-year study period. Of those reporting being ill, 74 (14%) did
not seek medical attention, with a large majority of those 74 reporting not
seeking medical care because they felt their illness was not serious enough to
justify medical attention and five stating that they did not seek medical attention
because of user charges. The authors estimate that this figure corresponds to
73 303 people in the overall study population.
Preliminary data from a northern region of Portugal (population 244 836) show
that there was a 6.2% decrease for primary health care visits between 2011 and
2012, but this decrease in health service utilization was mainly observed for
those exempt from user charges (9.4%). It was also observed in this region that
there was a reduction in transportation expenditure associated with primary
health care services of 24.0% between 2010 and 2011 and of 10.7% between
2011 and 2012. Data from this northern region of the country also show a
76% increase in referred cases for inpatient admissions between 2011 and 2012,
which may be attributable to a worsening of the clinical situation of patients
with mental health problems because of a lack of appropriate compliance with
their therapeutic regimens (Barbosa, 2013).
In the Lisbon district, 10 GPs and 9 nurses from a family health unit performed a
yearly “one day census” survey of its users, as part of its own self-evaluation process
(Biscaia, 2013). Two questions related to the financial crisis were included in
the 2012 and 2013 censuses. The 2012 survey took place in November;
173 users were invited to participate, and 128 returned a usable questionnaire
reflecting their experience during the first 10 months of 2012. Of those
surveyed, 27.2% stated that they refrained from using health care services
or taking pharmaceuticals during that time period. The 2013 survey took
place in April 2013, reflecting users' experience during the first trimester
of 2013 (132 users were invited to participate, with 104 returning usable
questionnaires); here 17.6% reported that they refrained from using health
services. It should be noted that in these samples the percentage of users
having a university degree varied from 20 to 25%. Comparative data prior to
2012 are also not available.