Study shows trend in medical visits

Press, 30 August 1986, Page 33

Study shows trend in medical visits

PA Hamilton Women at home make twice as many visits to doctors as women in the paid workforce, according to a Hamilton study reported in the latest “Medical Journal.”

In a survey of visits by women in the Hamilton health district, an Auck-. land University Medical School senior lecturer, Dr Peter Davis, fou>,d class differences were less significant than whether a woman was working at home or was in the paid workforce in relation to the number of visits she made to her doctor. Dr Davis said that based on two previous papers from the same study on the social class and ethnic group difference in medical visits by employed males it would be expected that working

class women would have a higher level of health service use.

However, his study showed that the group with the highest rate of visits was women in the upper two class categories who were at home. The level recorded for this group was at least 50 per cent higher than the rate reported for the next most frequent group, he said.

This was up to 100 per cent higher than doctor visits by employed males. Women in the paid workforce had similar doctor visiting patterns to employed men, he said.

However, when the condition was serious, as judged by the doctor, the inhibitions and barriers to visiting the doctor experienced by working-class women were'overcome to

an extent Both employed and unwaged working class women had higher rates of medical visits for severe symptoms. Dr Davis suggested two reasons for the difference between waged and unwaged women. “This high rate of medical contact among middieclass women in the home may reflect the joint influence of financial access and freedom from the fixed constraints on time imposed by paid employment,” he said.

The data also supported a trend previously reported of the “healthy worker effect," whereby employed women . reported fewer health problems and fewer visits to the doctor and other forms of illness behaviour than women in the home.