The Self-Evaluated Health And Health Conditions Of Rural Residents In A Developing Country
Published: August 1, 2010 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.7860/JCDR/2010/.844
BOURNE P A*
Department of Community Health and Psychiatry
Faculty of Medial Sciences.The University of the West Indies, Kingston 7, St. Andrew, WI
Correspondence
Paul Andrew Bourne, Research Fellow, Department of Community Health and Psychiatry, the University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston 7, St. Andrew, Jamaica, West Indies. Email: paulbourne1@yahoo.com. Tel.: (876) 457-6990. Fax: (876) 977-6346.
Background: In Jamaica, in 1989, the national poverty rate was 30.5% and this exponentially fell by 208.1% in 2007, but in the latter year, rural poverty was 4 times more than in the peri-urban areas and 3 times more than the urban poverty rate. Yet, there was no study on health status and health conditions in order to examine the changes among the rural residents. Aims: The present study aimed to (1) examine epidemiological shifts in the typology of the health conditions in rural Jamaicans, (2) determine the correlates and the estimates of the self-evaluated health status of the rural residents, (3) determine the correlates and estimates of the self-evaluated health conditions of the rural residents and (4) assist policy-makers in understanding how intervention programmes can be structured to address some of the identified inequalities among the rural residents in Jamaica.
Methods and Material: The current study involved the extraction of the samples of 15,260 and 3,322 rural residents from two national cross-sectional surveys (2002 and 2007 Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions).
Setting and Design: The survey was drawn using stratified random sampling. This design was a two-stage stratified random sampling design, where there was a Primary Sampling Unit and a selection of dwellings from the primary units.
Statistical Analyses: Statistical analyses were performed by using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. Descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, frequency and percentage were used to analyze the socio-demographical characteristics of the sample. The Chi-square test was used to examine the association between the non-metric variables and multiple logistics were used to establish the factors that explained a dichotomous dependent variable.
Results: In 2002, 14% of the respondents indicated having an illness in the 4-week period of the survey as compared to 17% in 2007. In 2002, there were 12 determinants of health: 11 social and 1 psychological, whereas in 2007, there were 7 determinants of health: 6 social and 1 biological. The determinants accounted for 22.6% of the explanatory power of the health model for 2002 and 44.7% for 2007.
Conclusion: With the exponential increase in diabetes mellitus and the health inequalities that exist today in rural Jamaica, public health authorities and other policy-makers need to use multidimensional intervention strategies to address those inequalities.
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