Quantity, Quality and Distribution of Health Personnel by Ethnic Group in Yunnan Province: 1982-1990

Throughout the world, there has been a concern with how to attract health care personnel to rural, remote, and less-developed areas. Health professionals prefer to locate in larger, more developed places, with better resources for their occupation, and with better social and cultural services for themselves and their families.

In many countries, policies to recruit and retain health personnel in rural and remote areas have been unsuccessful. There often is a trade-off for rural, remote, and minority areas between having health personnel with a low level of training and having no health personnel at all. It is also thought desirable to provide nationalities with health personnel who are members of that nationality, even though members of one nationality could receive health care from members of another nationality. Members of a nationality are likely to understand health-related preferences and concerns among that nationality more completely than would members of other nationalities.

Also, members of minority nationalities may speak only their own native language, so it is important to have health personnel available to communicate with patients in a common language. This paper examines the quantity, quality, and rural-urban distribution of health personnel by nationality in Yunnan Province in 1982 and 1990, based on micro-data from the 1982 and 1990 Censuses of China. Yunnan Province had the largest number of different nationalities in substantial numbers of any Chinese province.

The authors' find that between 1982 and 1990, although the number of health personnel in Yunnan increased by 19%, the number of health personnel per thousand population changed hardly at all. In addition, nationalities differed greatly in the number of health personnel per thousand population.

Data Used: 1% Sample of 1982 Census of China for Yunnan Province and 12.1% Sample of 1990 Census of China for Yunnan Province.

Dataset(s): Census: China, 1982 and 1990.