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Hindi Difficulties Visiting Hospitals in the Mountainous Areas in Japan
*Corresponding Author: Tani K, Department of General Medicine and Primary Care, Tokushima University Hospital, Tokushima, Japan, Email: taniken@tokushima-u.ac.jp
Copyright: © 2021 . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The relationship between hospital-visit costs and difficulties visiting hospitals has not been clarified. Consequently, in this study we examined individuals from a mountainous and a city region of Tokushima Prefecture, Japan, to determine the difficulties these people experience visiting hospitals and the impacts of their environment in this regard.
A questionnaire was distributed to patients who visited Kaminaka Hospital, located in a mountainous area of Tokushima Prefecture, and ones who visited Aijitsu Hospital, which is located in a city in the same prefecture. These data were analyzed using chi-square tests and the Mann-Whitney test.
For the mountain-based group, the time required for hospital visits was significantly longer than that of the city-based group. Further, the mountain-based group had higher costs required for hospital visits than the city-based group. Significantly more patients in the mountain-based low-income group than the city-based low-income group reported experiencing difficulties. Finally, in the mountain-based low-income group there was a tendency for a significant relationship between the monthly cost required for hospital visits and experiencing difficulties making such visits? This study indicates that low-income patients in the mountainous region of Tokushima Prefecture tend to experience difficulties visiting hospitals, mainly due to the costs of such visits.
