The Local Council Members' Attitudes to the Health Policy

지방의회의원들의 보건정책에 대한 인식

In order to understand the local council members' attitudes to the health policy, we conducted mail surveys using self-administered questionaire for 2 months(February and March. 1995). The study subjects were 2.312 local council members in Korea, but only about 11% among whom. 257 persons, responded to 2 times mail survey. This response rate revealed that the local council members was not interested in health care fields. The main results were as follows; The respondents thought that the economic and income development was most important among 15 regional policy agendas and the health care was the 5th or 7th important agenda. They. who had more health needs of and poor access to health care, tended to think that the health care was more important. They considered lobbying to and persuading the civil servants as the best method to tackle the local health care policy agenda. The respondents, who had poor access to health care facilities. tended to set the highest priority for the expansion of public and private health care resources. They expected that the election of local governor would activate the public health program more than thought that the program was implemented more actively than other region. The main opinion of respondents was that the central government had to take over planning and financing for the public health program, and the basic local government had to implment the program and budgeting. The majority of respondents agreed the private dominant medical care delivery system and nation-wide uniformed financing mechanism. Over 60% of them suggested that they were ready to suffer environmental pollution inducing health hazards for the purpose of regional economic and income development. About 75% of them favour the campaign for antismoking regardless of reducing local government's revenue from sale tax.