The effect of non-financial reserves of the health protection system on the state of health of women and men in Poland

Abstract

The aim of this research is to analyse the relationships between the volume and distribution of non-financial resources of the health care system (medical staff, infrastructure, diagnostic equipment)and the population’s state of health of women and men in Poland, at the age of 45 and 60, measured with the life expectancy indicator.

Research methods include the Least Squares (LS) method and the weighted LS, completed by selected measures of the model fitting: Akaike’s Information Criterion, Hannan-Quinn’s Criterion, Schwarz-Bayes’ Criterion.

Test results show the existence of statistically significant relationship between selected nonfinancial health resources and population’s state of health. It has been also proved, that, from the point of view of population state of health, primary health care resources and access to advanced diagnostics are the most important. A similar role plays by the number of hospital beds and operating rooms. The differences between the sexes and analysed age groups have not been clearly confirmed. In this research a cross-sectional data, by the provinces, for the years 2009 and 2013, have been employed. The data have been obtained from the Centre of Health Information Systems.