Factors that influence the public's view of medical care.

Abstract

The study was performed to assess on a probability sample the attitudes of households in a large metropolitan community towards medical care and the medical profession. These attitudes were correlated with the frequency of use of various medical facilities, age, sex, and socioeconomic status. The respondents' perceptions of personal physicians, emergency departments, and the profession were found by factor analysis to be independently related. Personal physicians were viewed much more favorably than the profession. Women differ markedly from men in their view of a personal physician and the profession, ie, women have more positive views about their own doctor the more they see him, which is not true for men; at the same time a woman's view of the profession decreases the more she sees her personal physician. An attempt to identify nonusers of medical care revealed that the nonuse is primarily related to socioeconomic factors.