Sociodemographic Variables Influence in Utilization of Professional Health Care.

Sociodemographics refers to the attributes used in defining a population, and they include education level, income, gender, age, and ethnicity. The sociodemographic variables play a massive factor in terms of influence in the utilization of professional healthcare. The sociodemographic variable plays a central in people’s behavior in terms of seeking healthcare services, and the significant variables are age, social networks, genders, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity.

Ethnicity plays a significant influence in that the healthcare professional might be forced to provide health decision-making based on the patient’s cultural context. However, the ethnicity variable is closely associated with socioeconomic status (Cockerham, 2017, p. 188). Thus the less socioeconomic status of an individual, the higher the ethnicity of the individual. This is effectively reflected in the middle class of mixed ethnic descent ranging from Hispanic to African Americans, who display similar norms and values when utilizing the health services. This means that there is a higher correlation between ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

Age is also another variable in terms of the utilization of healthcare services. Thus people who are above the age of sixty-five years are more likely to seek healthcare services than others age groups. There is also an increased health services utilization for the age group 45-64 (“Factors that affect healthcare utilization – healthcare utilization as a proxy in disability determination – NCBI bookshelf,” 2018). However, those between the ages of eighteen to forty-four years were found to use less of the health care services compared to other age groups as they were rated to use four percent.

Gender another sociodemographic variable of health. The females are more have a higher morbidity rate than the male based on the statistics retrieved from the Nation Centre of Health Statistics in the year 2016 (Cockerham, 2017, p. 189). The same statistics also revealed the gender with the highest rate of admission were the females. Furthermore, women tend to have more knowledge about health matters in comparison to men. The females tend to display a lifelong pattern due to their constant visits to the doctor compared to the males. Thus based on the patterns of behavior of the gender, the female tends to visit more than the male as the female tends to visit the doctors in early childhood, childbearing years, and forty-five. However, men tend to visit in early childhood and then after attaining the age of forty-five.

All the sociodemographic variables play a significant factor in terms of the utilization of health services. I also learned that females tend to have more life expectance because of the frequent visits to the doctors, which comes in three phases compared to men’s two stages. The second element that I also learned is that ethnicity is highly correlated with an individual’s socioeconomic status. People with higher socioeconomic status have lower ethnicity, which influences the utilization of health services.

The sociodemographic variables that I have analyzed play a significant role in my nursing profession. The knowledge will provide me with insight into why people at certain ages need more health services compared to other age groups (Reiners et al., 2019). It will also help to understand further the health need that the aging population requires for them to be healthy and thus design ways to allow the aging population to live independently and self-manage their chronic illnesses. The knowledge acquired from studying the sociodemographic variables will also enable me to understand further different cultures and how they respond to treatment and utilization of health services.

Overall, the sociodemographic variables play a crucial role in the utilization of health services, including ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, and gender. The elderly tend to utilize healthcare services in comparison to other age groups in a community. The female gender uses healthcare services more in contrast to the male gender. Those with high socioeconomic status are lowly inclined to ethnicity, and thus they also tend to rely on the health services in comparison to those who are highly inclined to race.

Reference

Cockerham, W. C. (2017). Medical Sociology (14th ed.). Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Factors that affect healthcare utilization – healthcare utilization as a proxy in disability determination – NCBI bookshelf. (2018, March 1). National Center for Biotechnology Information. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK500097/

Reiners, F., Sturm, J., Bouw, L. J., & Wouters, E. J. (2019). Sociodemographic factors influencing the use of eHealth in people with chronic diseases. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(4), 645.

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