Citation

Yang LY, Lynn AM, Chen TJ. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2015; 12(11): 14043-14054.

Affiliation

Department of Family Medicine, School of Medicine, National Yang-Ming University, No. 155, Section 2, Linong Street, Taipei 112, Taiwan. tjchen@vghtpe.gov.tw.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph121114043

PMID

26540064

Abstract

Pediatricians play a key role in the healthy development of children. Nevertheless, the practice patterns of pediatricians have seldom been investigated. The current study analyzed the nationwide profiles of ambulatory visits to pediatricians in Taiwan, using the National Health Insurance Research Database. From a dataset that was randomly sampled one out of every 500 records among a total of 309,880,000 visits in 2012 in the country, 9.8% (n = 60,717) of the visits were found paid to pediatricians. Children and adolescents accounted for only 69.3% of the visits to pediatricians. Male pediatricians provided 80.5% of the services and the main workforces were those aged 40-49 years. The most frequent diagnoses were respiratory tract diseases (64.7%) and anti-histamine agents were prescribed in 48.8% of the visits to pediatricians. Our detailed results could contribute to evidence-based discussions on health policymaking.

Language: en