Team-based primary care program for disabled people and changes in rate of unmet health care needs

Few studies have been conducted on the application of specific and practical methods, such as interventions, for reducing the unmet health care needs (UHCN) of disabled people.

The study aims to evaluate the impact of the team-based primary care program (TPCP) for disabled people on UHCN.

In 2017, we surveyed 696 disabled people who were enrolled in the TPCP at one of the 11 institutions belonging to the Korea Health Welfare Social Cooperative Federation from 2015 to 2017 to assess their unmet needs before and after enrolment. We conducted a logistic regression analysis before and after the program to evaluate the relationship between participation period and unmet needs after adjusting for physician type, gender, age, drinking, monthly income, disability type, personal assistance services and living alone.

After using the service, the proportion of disabled people with unmet needs decreased from 42.9% to 20.4% for a medical doctor and 43.6% to 18.6% for a Korean medical (KM) doctor. After adjusting for related factors and stratifying with type of physician, the proportion of disabled people with unmet needs decreased significantly in response to the participation period for the medical doctor-involved program (P-trend < 0.001); this was not observed in the KM counterpart (P-trend = 0.6).

The TPCP for disabled people provides disease prevention, health care and health promotion activities and is crucial for solving the unmet needs.