Health Inequalities: Who Is the Most Disadvantaged Among the Ukrainian Working-Age Population?

Abstract

Despite inequalities in health, it is a very well developed topic, andtackling health inequalities is one of the main challenges of modern publichealth policies, these are not much explored in Ukraine.The European Social Survey data pooled together from 2004, 2006,2008, 2010, and 2012 including 6,820 Ukrainian respondents of working-age.Self-reported health was used as a dependent variable and four groups ofsocial determinants of health – as predictors. The multilevel binomial logisticregression analysis was conducted to investigate gender and social differencesin subjective health. Both genders were analyzed together and separately.Almost 60 % of the Ukrainian working-age population reported poor health.Multilevel binomial logistic regression analysis showed that respondents whowere female, married or had been divorced, and had children at home tendedto report poor health; the probability of poor health is increasing with age anddecreasing with the level of SES for both genders.Existence of between and within gender groups’ social inequalities inself-reported health as well as the most disadvantaged female subgroups arerevealed among the Ukrainian working-age population.