Persons receiving care from selected health care practitioners: United States, 1980

In the household survey phase of the National Medical Care Utilization and Expenditure Survey of 1980, a survey was made of 17,123 persons who made up a representative sample of the civilian population in the United States not residing in institutions. Through repeated interviews the survey obtained information on the health conditions of these people, the health care services they received in 1980, the costs of these services, and the arrangements made for paying for the services. This report, one of a series of reports on the knowledge gained through the survey, is on the people who received services during the year from nurses, optometrists, podiatrists, psychologists, paramedics, physical therapists, social workers and counselors, laboratory technicians, radiologic technicians, other technicians, and all other practitioners; thus, this report is on people receiving services from the various types of practitioners other than physicians and dentists. In addition to excluding the military and persons living in nursing homes and other institutions, the report excludes people receiving nonphysician and nondentist services if they were only received in the same visit in which a physician or dentist was seen, if they were received in an emergency room, or if they were received while the person was an inpatient in a hospital. More than one-third of the nation's population had one or more such visits with practitioners other than physicians and dentists in 1980, according to estimates from the National Medical Care Utilization and Expenditure Survey. Approximately 1 person out of every 8 had a visit with a nurse; about 1 person of every 11 visited an optometrist during the year; 1 of 15 visited a lab technician; 1 of 25 visited a chiropractor; 1 of 37 visited a radiologic technician; and 1 of every 50 visited a podiatrist. Psychologists, paramedics, and physical therapists were each visited by about 1 percent of the population. People varied in their likelihood of seeing the various types of practitioners, depending on their personal characteristics, the condition of their health, and where they lived: In general, the practitioners were more likely to have been visited at least once during the year by women than by men, whites than by blacks or other races, non-Hispanics than by Hispanics, the old than by the young, those with more education than by those with less, those with poor health, those with activity limitations, and those living outside the South. There was little relationship, in general, between level of income and visiting a practitioner.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)