key: cord-0024052-12d3eurw authors: Pu, Lida title: Fairness of the Distribution of Public Medical and Health Resources date: 2021-11-10 journal: Front Public Health DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.768728 sha: 4e1d560dc7d75da51f0ed814519e1f456edc6ff8 doc_id: 24052 cord_uid: 12d3eurw The fairness of health services is an important indicator of the World Health Organization's performance evaluation of health services, and the fairness of health resource allocation is the prerequisite for the fairness of health services. The research in this article aims to explore how to use health and medical resources fairly and effectively to allocate health resources in different fields, populations and projects, in order to achieve the maximization of social and economic benefits of health and medical resources. In the study of the distribution and equity of public health and medical resources, we comprehensively apply Gini coefficient, Theil index, Lorentz curve and difference index, based on the theory of health resource allocation and the theory of health equity, the province's health service resources have been researched and evaluated, combined with regional health planning theories and public health theories, a variety of scientific methods were used to analyze community health service resources at all levels across the country. At the same time, we reviewed the journal literature about the treatment of patients and children, and analyzed the patients admitted to medical institutions in various regions. The research in this paper found that from 2016 to 2020, the Gini coefficient of the province's health institutions according to population distribution has been fluctuating between 0.14 and 0.17. During this 5-year period, the Gini coefficient of the distribution of medical and health expenditures by population shows a downward trend year by year. From 2019, reach below 0.1, this shows that the fairness of the allocation of health resources according to population has a clear trend of improvement. Since the reform and opening up, our country's health care has developed rapidly, and the health of the people has been greatly improved. With China's accession to the WTO, the primary problem facing the Chinese government and the medical and health system is how to adapt to the rapid changes in domestic and foreign events and formulate a consistent health policy. The 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to build a well-off society in an all-round way, and to create a new situation of socialism with Chinese characteristics as its work goal. At the same time, it calls on the medical and health industry to "create and improve the medical and health system and health level, and promote the physical and mental health of the people" as an important part of improving people's lives and promoting healthy development. In addition, the new round of medical reform proposes that medical and health services always maintain a public welfare nature. In order to achieve the goal of everyone enjoying basic medical and health services, this stipulates that the government's regulation of health resource management becomes the main choice, and the government's macro-control must be led to achieve fairness and effectiveness. At the same time, the people actively cooperate with the government's actions, raise problems and solve them with the joint efforts of the government and the people, so as to make the distribution of public health resources fair and stable. Physical health is the basis for people to engage in other activities. Medical and health activities are social activities that maintain and restore people's basic survival and activity skills. The prerequisite for the smooth progress of medical and health activities is the reasonable management of medical resources and health resources, and reasonable enjoyment of medical and health resources is the fundamental guarantee for safeguarding the interests of human health. It is a key content related to the overall development of the health industry and a necessary condition for the stable, coordinated and healthy development of the pharmaceutical and health industry. How to manage health resources scientifically and rationally, make full use of limited resources, better serve the people, and improve people's physical and mental health has become an urgent problem to be solved. Combined with the research progress at home and abroad, different scholars have different views and explorations on such issues. Sam and Nunn criticized the current knowledge about patient and public participation, here called patient and public participation (PPI), and called for the development of robust and theoretically based strategies throughout the continuity of medical education. The study draws on a series of relevant literature and regards PPI as a response process related to the patient-centered learning agenda (1). Cheng et al. proposed an attention-based two-way gated recurrent unit (AB-GRU) medical migration prediction model to predict which hospitals patients will go to in the future (2) . The focus of Embrett and Randall's research is to understand how the framework of the problem affects government decisions related to the cancellation of medical service funding. To achieve this goal, a framework describing how the problem frame or explanatory narrative affects government policy decisions was developed and applied to actual cases (3). Osadchuk et al. research aims to ensure the protection and enhancement of everyone's physical and mental health by providing high-quality medical and preventive care, and to maintain their long-term active life. Although human health does not have an accurate market price, it has the highest value for society and individuals (4). Mohammad et al. study investigated the prevalence and related risk factors of job burnout among public service medical staff in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah who participated in the fight against the Covid-19 epidemic. A cross-sectional study was conducted involving 201 medical personnel working in all government hospitals and health clinics (5) . Ruiz-Mejía and Méndez-Durán studied the reasons for the high incidence of chronic noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, systemic hypertension, overweight, obesity, dyslipidemia and metabolic syndrome (6) . Feng and Pan's research on telemedicine allows limited available medical resources to be shared and fully utilized, and many economically underdeveloped provinces can enjoy higher-level medical sharing services. The overall design of the public health emergency management system will be based on the Internet of Things in accordance with system functions and low latency (7) . In order to capture the impact of the spatial heterogeneity of the resources available in the environment and the public health system on the persistence and extinction of infectious diseases, Jlng GE proposed a simplified spatial SIS reaction diffusion model. This model has the allocation and utilization efficiency of medical resources (8) . Although these studies give the impact of medical services on expenditures, they are only one-sided and do not analyze the fairness of the allocation of public medical and health resources in terms of population distribution and geographic location. The innovations of this article are embodied in several aspects: first, it essentially explains the importance of fair distribution of public resources, and puts forward the principles and standards of fair distribution. Second, analyze whether residents have equal access to public resources from the perspective of knowledge and geographical differences. Third, in terms of analysis methods, the method of combining statistics and qualitative analysis is used to analyze the effectiveness of health resource allocation and public health benefits. At the same time, through field research and empirical analysis, the factors that affect the effective allocation of public health resources are explored. Health resource allocation refers to the distribution and transfer (flow) of health resources to health departments and health care providers. It is the government or the market that enables health resources to be appropriately allocated to different types, different departments, different institutions, different projects, and different groups of people, thereby increasing the benefits of the community and the value of health resources. It can be seen from Figure 1 that all social resources are inseparable from health and medical resources. At the same time, in Figure 2 we can also see that health care is closely related to our lives. The development of health services has become an important indicator to measure the comprehensive strength of a country and region. How health resources are allocated determines whether health output can meet the goals of comprehensive social and economic development with high quality and quantity. This is related to the basic living issues of hundreds of millions of people. It is related to the development level of the whole country's health service (9) . Today's medical and health services have undergone major changes compared with those before the reform and opening up. Today's medical and health services can guarantee people's basic living needs and can make people sick and treatable. Before the reform and opening up, our country realized the allocation of health resources through a planning mechanism. The main problem with this allocation model is that it cannot meet the requirements of multi-level growth and large-scale production of medical care in rural and urban communities. Under the condition of limited government finances, the overall allocation of health resources is insufficient and the allocation efficiency is relatively low; with the transition of the financial system from a planned econoour to a market econoour, the government's control over medical institutions has gradually loosened, and the national medical reform has also moved toward a market-oriented path, advocating market-oriented configuration and operation. The proportion of government investment in the medical and health field has fallen, and medical expenses have risen rapidly. Under this model, although it is possible to rapidly increase health resources and improve allocation efficiency to a certain extent, due to the profit-seeking characteristics of the market, the end result is that health resources flow to areas with more developed economic development and strong ability to pay, while ignoring the fairness of health resource allocation, leading to the lack of public welfare in public hospitals. There has been a serious problem of "difficult and expensive medical treatment, " which eventually led to a decline in the efficiency of medical and health services, which obviously deviated from the Pareto efficiency curve. Therefore, excessive commercialization has not only brought social injustice, but also caused the loss of profitability (10) . Therefore, in order to ensure fairness, the government must actively and reasonably participate in the allocation of health resources, and at the same time, it should give full play to the role of the market mechanism, improve the efficiency of health resource allocation. It is hoped that in the future, the fairness of the distribution of public medical and health resources will be realized, the problems of "difficult and expensive medical treatment" will no longer arise, and the allocation of health resources will eventually be shared by all. The objects of medical and health services and the end of the service process are people in society. Therefore, the allocation of medical and health resources should reflect the people-oriented concept, focusing on ensuring the health of the whole people, and improving people's health and quality of life. The needs of society determine the provision of medical and health services, and the allocation of medical and health resources should be oriented to meet social needs. Coordinating and rationally distributing limited medical resources and health resources through medical and health service design, and effectively balancing regional surplus or shortage of medical and health resources through resource allocation and redistribution (11) . Reform and opening up and economic globalization have promoted social and economic development, and extensive social changes have also followed. The improvement of people's living standards and the increase in health awareness put higher demands on our country's medical and health services. It is bound to affect and change the allocation of medical and health resources in terms of total, quality, and structure (12) . The increasing purchasing power and demand of residents for medical and health services makes the provision of medical and health services not only characterized by sufficiency and diversity, but also taking into account the important factors of the quality, balance and sustainability of medical and health services, to adapt to economic and social development. Fairness and effectiveness is an important principle for the government to allocate medical and health resources, and it is also a long-term goal (13) . Equity in the field of health services refers to ensuring that every member of society has an equal opportunity to enjoy medical and health services based on the allocation of medical and health resources on demand. Medical and health efficiency includes two concepts of econoour and ethics, that is, unreasonable allocation of health resources is both a waste and immoral (14) . Paying attention to justice and fairness can not only promote the realization of fairness and fairness and the improvement of human health, but also an important guarantee for health and sustainability, and the sustainable development of health services. The requirement of "prevention first, grassroots as the focus, and equal emphasis on Chinese and Western medicine" is a policy guideline for improving the status quo of medical and health care. Due to the relatively slow development of the rural econoour and poor basic medical and health conditions, the current situation of rural medical and health is far from that of cities. The degree of improvement in rural medical and health conditions is related to the reform process and development trend of our country's overall medical and health services (15) . The allocation of medical and health resources must start from the grassroots level, focusing on improving the level of rural medical and health care. Medical and health investment and related policies need to focus on rural areas and strive to narrow the gap between urban and rural areas. Implement basic medical and health services in rural areas, and ensure that farmers enjoy fair and effective rights to basic medical and health care. Effectively solve the major medical and health problems in rural areas such as difficulty in seeing a doctor, expensive medical care, poverty due to illness, and illness due to poverty, etc., it is necessary not only to improve the health of rural residents, but also to achieve social fairness and justice in the process of medical and health resource allocation (16) . The Gini Coefficient (Gini) is a widely used analysis indicator to measure the income gap of residents in a country (or region). Calculate the Gini coefficient according to the Lorentz curve and the type of Gini coefficient. Quantitative indicators are obtained through data processing and figure area estimation, and the degree of difference in the allocation of medical and health resources is analyzed (17) . When the Gini coefficient is lower than 0.2, it means that the allocation of medical and health resources is absolutely even; 0.2 to 0.3 means that the configuration is relatively average, and there is a small gap;0.3 to 0.4 means that the configuration is relatively average and reasonable, but there is a certain gap; 0.4 to 0.5 means that the configuration gap is large. Above 0.6 indicates a huge gap in allocation, and 0.4 is used as a warning line for the gap in resource allocation. As follows: Among them, A i is the ratio of the population (or geographic area) of each region to the total population (or total geographic area); B i is the ratio of the number of health resource indicators in each region to the total number of corresponding health resource indicators; C i = B 1 + B 1 + ...B i is the cumulative percentage of health resources. The Gini coefficient is between 0 and 1. The closer the Gini coefficient is to 0, the fairer the distribution of medical and health resources; the closer the Gini coefficient is to 1, the more unfair the medical and health resources are (18) . The Theil index is an important indicator to measure the balance of social resource distribution in a region. In Western science, the Theil index is a method of measuring balance. It checks the fairness and inequality of the distribution of resources by checking whether the weight of the population corresponds to the weight of its income (19) . The Theil index value is >0, and its value is smaller, which indicates that health resources can be allocated in this field more effectively. The calculation formula of Theil index is as follows: In the formula, if A i is the proportion of each city's population in the province's total population; then B i is the proportion of each city's health resources in the province's total health resources. Decomposition of Theil index: T total = T between groups + T s (3) In the formula, T is always the overall difference; within the T group is the difference in the allocation of health resources in Type I, Type II, and Type III areas. Among the T groups are the differences in the allocation of health resources among the Type I, Type II, and Type III areas. A j is the ratio of the population of each region to the total population. B j is the ratio of the amount of health resources in each region to the total amount of health resources. T j is the Theil index of each region. Contribution rate of differences within and between groups to the total Theil index: contribution rate of difference within groups = within T group/T total; contribution rate of difference between groups = T between groups/T total. American economic statistician M. Lorenz first proposed the Lorenz curve to study the optimal allocation of urban and rural medical and health resources, and to study the rational distribution of property, land and income (20) . Suppose the distribution density function of the income variable a is s(a) (that is, the percentage of the population with income a to the total population), the total population is M, then the population whose income is