The project is part of a larger plan concerning four dimensions of universalism in the Finnish health care system.

Objectives

The aim of the project is to examine trends in use of somatic specialist care in 1996–2010. How has socioeconomic and regional equity developed in specialist care and in some common elective procedures?

Implementation

In the project the data for hospital use was extracted from the Hospital Discharge register (THL) for years 1996–2010. Sociodemographic data were individually linked to these using the Employment Statistics maintained by Statistics Finland. In the analyses we use methods of healt services research developed for register based studies including age-standardized proportions, Poisson regression models for repeated measurements, and multilevel models.

Partners

University of Tampere, Unit of Health Sciences is in charge of the project, also researchers from the University of Kuopio are involved in the project.

Funding

The project is partly funded by the Academy of Finland, and coordinated in University of Tampere (Unit for Health Sciences).

Contact information

Ilmo Keskimäki
Research Professor, Health and Social System Research Unit
tel. +358 2952 47256
E-mail: firstname.lastname@thl.fi