Abstract
Child health has been addressed as a priority at both global and national levels for many decades. In China, difficulty of accessing paediatricians has been of debate for a long time, however, there is limited evidence to assess the population- and geography-related inequality of paediatric workforce distribution. This study aimed to analyse the inequality of the distributions of the paediatric workforce (including paediatricians and paediatric nurses) in China by using Lorenz curve, Gini coefficient, and Theil L index, data were obtained from the national maternal and child health human resource sampling survey conducted in 2010. In this study, we found that the paediatric workforce was the most inequitable regarding the distribution of children <7 years, the geographic distribution of the paediatric workforce highlighted very severe inequality across the nation, except the Central region. For different professional types, we found that, except the Central region, the level of inequality of paediatric nurses was higher than that of the paediatricians regarding both the demographic and geographic distributions. The inner-regional inequalities were the main sources of the paediatric workforce distribution inequality. To conclude, this study revealed the inadequate distribution of the paediatric workforce in China for the first time, substantial inequality of paediatric workforce distribution still existed across the nation in 2010, more research is still needed to explore the in-depth sources of inequality, especially the urban-rural variance and the inner- and inter-provincial differences, and to guide national and local health policy-making and resource allocation.
Highlights
Child health has been addressed as a priority at both national and global levels for many decades [1]
Since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in September 2000, unprecedented progress has been made in improving child health and reducing child mortality all around the world [2]
The indicator of indicator live adopted births was as an approximate future children, of inequality live birthsofwas asadopted an approximate proxy of proxy futureof children, the levelthe oflevel inequality of the of the paediatric workforce distribution to future children was higher than the serving children in paediatric workforce distribution to future children was higher than to theto serving children in 2010, 2010, and this indicates that the inequitable distribution of the paediatric workface may be worse in and this indicates that the inequitable distribution of the paediatric workface may be worse in the years the years following
Summary
Child health has been addressed as a priority at both national and global levels for many decades [1]. The year of 2015 witnessed the end of the MDGs period and the new era of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for guiding the post-2015 development agenda. According to the new requirements of SDG 3, continual efforts should be made to end preventable deaths of children, and to make sure that every child can have equitable access to affordable, accountable, appropriate health services of assured quality [5,6,7]. This is especially challenging for developing countries [8]. In the Chinese child development blueprint for this decade
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