Performance evaluations, trust and utilization of health care in China: understanding relationships between attitudes and health-related behaviour

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This interdisciplinary project establishes a new collaboration among UK researchers and a leading Chinese social research team, to conduct the first major study of Chinese people's attitudes towards their health care. The project's core theoretical contribution will be to understanding the relationships between attitudes and health-related behaviours, focussing particularly on how people evaluate their health system, their trust in doctors and the health system, and their utilization of preventive and curative health services. Previous quantitative research on China's health system has examined the influence on utilization of age and gender, incomes, insurance protection, distance to health service providers and perceived health care needs. Yet work done in other countries has shown that attitudes, including performance evaluations and trust, can impact on people's decisions about when and where to use health services. At the same time, qualitative studies in China have suggested that people are often critical of performance and that there is a crisis of trust in doctors and the health care system. Our project will be the first systematic study of these attitudes and how they influence utilization. Beyond its contributions to understanding influences on utilization and thereby to health policy making in China and elsewhere, our project will contribute to political science by assessing the implications of health-related attitudes for government support and legitimacy. It will also benefit Chinese health policy makers through its findings on ordinary people's evaluations of the system. China's health system has experienced enormous transformations over the last thirty years affecting the lives of all its many citizens, but health policy making has been dominated by the concerns of elites. Although into the 21st century some of those elites--as well as international organizations and researchers--have criticized the health care system as unfair and costly, there has been little in-depth research on how the public view it. Our study will combine focus groups with the first nationally-representative social survey to ask questions about health system performance and trust alongside socio-demographic characteristics, enabling factors, health needs, and health-related behaviours, especially utilization of preventive and curative health care services. It will produce a major dataset enabling UK and international researchers to study the relationships between attitudes and behaviour in the Chinese health care system. It will also develop social science research capacity in the UK and China by forging a new partnership among leading researchers in the field of Chinese public opinion and health survey research. The project will be of use to international NGOs and organizations such as the World Bank and World Health Organization active in shaping health policy in China and in other developing countries. Our findings also have potential to impact on practices of the UK government's Department for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme because understanding health behaviours and improving health are vital to reducing global poverty. With health a key area for the Chinese government and central to national socio-economic development and political stability, our findings will also be of use to UK foreign and economic policy makers now increasingly engaging with this rising power. Finally, China's growing wealth and aging population mean that health care services are expected to consume an increasing share of household incomes and national GDP, making China a major emerging health care market. Our examination of how socio-economic and demographic factors relate to attitudes and utilization of the health care system will be therefore be of value to British insurance and pharmaceutical firms as well as those involved in hospital provision.