Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Eunjeong Kang, PhD, Center for Health Promotion, Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, 42-14 Bulkwang-dong Eunpyung-gu, Seoul, South Korea, 82-2-380-8195, marchej@kihasa.re.kr

The purpose of this study is to report the prevalence of the use of the following four preventive servcies: Infant hearing screening, infant metabolic screening, eyesight examination, and preventive dental care among Korean children by their socioeconomic status.

The 2005 National Health and Nutrition Survey conducted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare was used as the data. The survey sample represents non-institutionalized civilians in Korea. The sampling method was a two-stage stratified cluster sampling. In total, 34,131 of which 5,303 were under 12 in 12,001 households were interviewed. Parents or guardians were asked to whether their children had had the four preventive services in the past. Person weights were applied for national estimations. Chi-square tests were used to analyze the relationship between preventive service use and socioeconomic status of children. Among children aged less than 7, 57.0%, 87.2%, and 36.7% of them reported that they had infant hearing screening, infant metabolic screeing, and eyesight examination. 61.4% of children younger than 12 had used any preventive dental care service. There were no differences in hearing screening and eyesight examination by SES, however metabolism screening and preventive dental care use were less among low income children.

Compared to US, the use of the four preventive services was lower among Korean children. Korea needs to specify cllinical guidelines and regulations to oblige all the children to receive preventive services and to expand the public health system to enable all the low income children to receive appropriate preventive care.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe disparities in preventive service use by socioeconomic status among Korean children
• Compare the use of four preventive services between Korea and US

Keywords: Access and Services, Prevention

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered