Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

Comparing income inequalities in healthcare utilization in the low income community in suburban Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia

Background

This paper aims to measure and compare income inequalities in healthcare utilization in the low income community in suburban Kuala Lumpur as compared to the national population level in Malaysia. The prevalence of those who sought outpatient treatment for acute and chronic illnesses and also prevalence of inpatient admission in both public and private health facilities were compared.

Materials and methods

The data consists of 800 households with 3722 respondents from four Projek Perumahan Rakyat (PPR) among the low income community in suburban Kuala Lumpur and compared with data from the National Health and Morbidity Survey in 2006 consisting of 13,637 households with 56,710 respondents. The income inequalities are explored using concentration index (CI) with CI values below zero indicating pro-poor inequality whereas CI values above zero indicating pro-rich inequality.

Results

For the low income community, analysis across ranked monthly household income reveals that in government-led public healthcare facilities, inequalities in outpatient attendances and inpatient admission to be in favor of the lower socioeconomic groups with CI values of -0.0874 and -0.0636 respectively (as compared to-0.1722 and -0.0869 at the national level). By contrast, in private healthcare facilities, inequalities in outpatient attendances and inpatient admission clearly to be in favor of the higher socioeconomic groups with significant CI values of 0.2090 and 0.2309 respectively (as compared to 0.1851 and 0.5176 at the national level).

Conclusions

The low income community clearly has higher need for healthcare especially with rising prevalence of chronic illnesses and non-communicable diseases. As such, a pro-poor inequality is expected to exist in the utilization of healthcare in public healthcare facilities. Since similar patterns of utilization are observed both at the low income community level and national level, the lower socioeconomic groups are found to be benefitting through sufficient targeting of healthcare resources in Malaysia.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Open Access  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Thangiah, N., Majid, H.A. & Su, T.T. Comparing income inequalities in healthcare utilization in the low income community in suburban Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia. BMC Health Serv Res 14 (Suppl 2), P144 (2014). https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1472-6963-14-S2-P144

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1472-6963-14-S2-P144

Keywords