Health literacy and health-information seeking behaviour (HISB) play vital roles in health outcome improvements. This study examines the extent of income-related inequality in health literacy and health-information seeking as well as the contributions of the main socioeconomic determinants in China. We analysed representative data of participants aged over 18 years as well as older adults from the Guangzhou Community Health Survey. A concentration index (CI) was used to quantify the degree of income-related inequity in health literacy and health-information seeking. Probit regression models were employed to decompose the CI into the contributions to each factor. Results showed a significant pro-rich distribution of adequate health literacy (CI: 0.0602, P < 0.001; horizontal index [HI]: 0.0562, P < 0.001) and HISB from healthcare professionals (CI: 0.105, P < 0.001; HI: 0.0965, P < 0.001). The pro-rich distribution of health literacy was mainly attributable to education background (contribution: 54.76%), whereas income inequalities contributed most to the pro-rich distribution of health-information seeking among an urban population (contribution: 62.53%). Public interventions in China to reduce inequality in health literacy and HISBs among the urban population, coupled with easily accessible information sources on health, warrant further attention from policymakers.

Medical education is critical and the first step to foster the competence of a physician. Unlike developed countries, China has been adopting a system of multi-tiered medical education to training physicians, which is featured by the provision of an alternative lower level of medical practitioners, or known as a feldsher system since the 1950s. This study aimed to illustrate the impact of multi-tiered medical education on both the equity in the delivery of health care services and the efficiency of the health care market. Based on both theoretical reasoning and empirical analysis, this paper documented evidence upon those impacts of the medical education system. First, the geographic distribution of physicians in China is not uniform across physicians with different educational training. Second, we also find the evidence that high-educated doctors are more likely to be hired by larger hospitals, which in turn add the fuel to foster the hospital-center health care system in China as patients choose large hospitals to chase good doctors. Third, through the channels of adverse selection and moral hazard, the heterogeneity in medical education also imposes costs to the health care market in China. Overall, the three-tiered medical education system in China is a standard policy trade-off between quantity and quality in training health care professionals. On the one hand, China gains the benefit of increasing the supply of health care professionals at lower costs. On the other hand, China pays the price for keeping a multi-tiered medical education in terms of increasing inequality and efficiency loss in the health care sector. Finally, we discuss the potential policy options for China to mitigate the negative impact of keeping a multi-tiered medical education on the performance of health care market.

Objective: Health equality has drawn much public attention in both developed and developing countries. China, the largest developing country, has implemented a new round of health system reform to improve health equality since 2009. This study aims to examine the magnitude and sources of income-related health inequality in western rural regions of China.Methods: Data were obtained from the Survey of Rural Economic and Social Development in Western China conducted in 2014, in which 14,555 individuals from 5,299 households in 12 provinces were included. Health outcome variables of interest were self-rated health status, prevalence of chronic disease and four-week illness. Concentration index was calculated to assess magnitude of income-related health inequality, and nonlinear decomposition analysis was performed to identify the sources of health inequality.Results: The Concentration indexes for poor self-rated health status, prevalence of chronic disease and four-week illness were −0.0898 (P<0.001),−0.0860 (P<0.001) and −0.1284 (P<0.001), respectively. Income and education were two main sources of health inequality, accounting for about 25−50% and 15% contribution to the inequality. Ethnicity made <10% contribution to income-related health inequality, and enrollment in New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme contributed to <1%.Conclusion: This study found slight income-related health inequality among rural residents in western China, implying that although China has made substantial progress in economic development and poverty alleviation, health inequality in western rural region should still be concerned by the government. To achieve health equality further, the Chinese government should not only strengthen its reimbursement mechanism of the current health insurance scheme to improve affordability of primary healthcare for residents in western rural regions, but also implement health poverty alleviation policies targeting socioeconomically vulnerable population and ethnic minorities in future.

Background: The lower job satisfaction of health-care staff will lead to more brain drain, worse work performance, and poorer health-care outcomes. The aim of this study was to identify patterns of job satisfaction among health-care staff in rural China, and to investigate the association between the latent clusters and health-care staff’s personal and professional features; Methods: We selected 12 items of five-point Likert scale questions to measure job satisfaction. A latent-class analysis was performed to identify subgroups based on the items of job satisfaction; Results: Four latent classes of job satisfaction were identified: 8.9% had high job satisfaction, belonging to “satisfied class”; 38.2% had low job satisfaction, named as “unsatisfied class”; 30.5% were categorized into “unsatisfied class with the exception of interpersonal relationships”; 22.4% were identified as “pseudo-satisfied class”, only satisfied with management-oriented items. Low job satisfaction was associated with specialty, training opportunity, and income inequality. Conclusions: The minority of health-care staff belong to the “satisfied class”. Three among four subgroups are not satisfied with income, benefit, training, and career development. Targeting policy interventions should be implemented to improve the items of job satisfaction based on the patterns and health-care staff’s features.

The annual number of newly licensed physicians is an important indicator of medical workforce supply, which can accurately reflect an inflow into the health care market over a period. In order to both regulate medical professions and improve the quality of health care services, China established its medical licensing system from the point of the implementation of ‘Law on Practising Doctors’ in 1999. The objective of this study is to depict the trend and structure of newly licensed physicians thereafter. This study analyses a unique census data set that provides the headcount of newly licensed physicians from 2005 to 2015 in China. We also review a short history of medical licensing system reform in China since the 1990s. The annual number of first-time licensed physicians in China increased from 159 489 in 2005 to 221 639 in 2015. Up to 2015, over half of newly licensed physicians had not received a medical education equivalent to a bachelor degree or higher. Around 51% of China’s newly licensed physicians were female in 2005, while the same ratio for females in 2015 was 56%. This article first provides an exploratory analysis of physician inflow into health care market in China using physician licensing data. The medical licensing system in China allows entering physicians with a broad range of educational levels. Moreover, the feminisation of the physician supply in China has become increasingly apparent and its impacts on health care provision still require more rigorous examination.