Verification of the health care region in Fukuoka Prefecture.

Abstract

Because the change in the location of industries, if comprehensive health care is to be promoted, there is need to derive a methodology for finding the life cycle patterns of the residents and to set up health care regions from these results. Formally, health care had evolved within the prefecture or the Health Center administrative districts with each spectrum of health promotion, "disease prevention" and "diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation" using fragmented and unrelated methods. However, there is need to designate the region for health care planning aside from the present units for administrative purposes. With this object in mind, Fukuoka Prefecture, which has experienced a dramatic change in industrial structure, was selected as an example. Regions were designated centering around the analysis of "socio-economic aspects" and "demographic characteristics". From the viewpoint of the relationship with the life style, the geographical extent of the activity of the residents was studied through the commuting areas. Based on this activity range and the geographical distribution of the industrial locations, a reasonable "Region for health care" was designated. The first quantitative approach to verify the results was made by using the weighted pair-group method and principal component analysis. And from the vantage of the Fuzzy Sets-theory, a multivariate technique centering around clustering analysis was next utilized to analyse.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)