A positive legacy of trauma? A study on the impact of natural disasters on medical utilization

Abstract

Objective

The impact of natural disasters on medical utilization is largely unknown and often overlooked how it affects bereaving and non-bereaving survivors. The aim of this study is to determine the medical utilization between both survivor groups and long-term effects.

Study design

A 10-year 1999–2009 population-based retrospective study by using the National Health Insurance claim database and the Household Registration database from the Department of Health, Executive Yuan, Taiwan.

Settings

Taiwan 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake-affected areas.

Participants

A total of 49 834 individuals which included 1183 bereaving survivors and 48 651 non-bereaving earthquake survivors.

Intervention(s)

None.

Main Outcome Measures

Medical utilization of bereaving and non-bereaving survivors.

Results

The results showed that bereaving survivors had significantly more outpatient visits before the earthquake, within 3-month period and 1 year after earthquake (odds ratio (OR) = 1.11, 1.16 and 1.08). However, after 1 year after earthquake their outpatient visits were not significantly different from non-bereaving, and even significantly less in some years. Inpatient visits of bereaving survivors had similar trend to outpatient visits, i.e. visits were more both before earthquake and within 3-month period after earthquake (OR = 1.59 and 1.89), however, they were not significantly higher than non-bereaving survivors for the following years of the study.

Conclusion

Our study reveals that compared to non-bereaving survivors, bereaving survivors slightly had higher medical utilization in the beginning stage of earthquake, i.e. for the first 3-month period or 1 year after earthquake. However, there were no differences between these two groups in medical utilization including outpatient and inpatient visits in long run.

bereaving survivors, earthquake, health risk, health expenditure, medical utilization, nature disasters