Abstract
There exists a general consensus in Korea that patients tend to concentrate in large hospitals and this tendency is partly responsible for inefficiency in health services. The process of choosing a medical care provider for health care services and evaluating the provider after utilization seems to involve many diverse factors to become very complex. Therefore a systemsatic study is needed to achieve sufficient understanding of the proeess. For this point of view, this study investigates patient's selection of medical care institution for delivery care services and their evaluation of the institution after delivery. In more specific, the objectives of the study are twofold: 1) to identify the factors associated with expectant mothers' choice of type of medical care institution for delivery among tertiary hospitals, general hospitals, small hospitals, and clinics: and 2) to understand the factors affecting patient evaluation of the medical care institution after delivery. The data used for the analysis were collected through face-to-face interviews with those women who had childbirth during the period from January 1, 1996 to the date of interview in February 1998. The survey was conducted using preqared structured questionnaire in Seoul. The sample was drawn from each of arbitrarily defined four regions of Seoul, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast and Southwest, in proportion to the number of births reported in 1996 in each of them. The distribution of the interviewed women by educational level was made similar to that of mothers of new babies reported in 1996. The sample size was planned to be about 300, but ended up with analytical sample of 319. Major conclusions emerged from the analysis can be summarized as follows: 1) Large hospitals were evaluated as much better for technical quality than other types of institutions, whereas they were compared similar to or worse for other attributes. And it was found that technical quality of care is considered as the most important condition of medical care institution for delivery, while the amount of direct cost is considered as the least important one. Taken together, the utilization of large hospitals is not likely to decrease even though they cannot give satisfaction to patients in other aspects than technical quality. 2) The activeness in the search for information affected the respondents' evaluation of medical care institutions, which would influence their later decision or recommendation to other persons as to the choice of source of health care services. Therefore, increased efforts should be directed to improving availability of useful and correct information for patients in relation to the utilization of health care services. 3) Since the findings of this study were obtained from the analysis of delivery care services, their applicability to other kinds of services may be limited. Thus it would be useful to conduct a comparative study of several kinds of services explicitly taking into account the characteristics of those services in the analysis.
