The distance and chance of lifetime geographical movement of physicians in Japan: an analysis using the age-period-cohort model

Abstract

BackgroundThe uneven geographical distribution of physicians in Japan is a result of those physicians electing to work in certain locations. In order to understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to analyze the geographic movement of physicians across the Japanese landscape.MethodsWe obtained individual data on physicians from 1978 to 2012 detailing their attributes, work institutions, and locations. The data are from Japanese governmental sources (the Survey of Physicians, Dentists, and Pharmacists). The total sample size was 122 150 physicians, with 77.5% being male and 22.5% female. After obtaining the data, we calculated the geographical distance of each physician’s movement by using geographic information systems software (GIS; ArcGIS, ESRI, Inc., CA, USA). Geographical distance was then converted into time distance. We compared the resulting median values through nonparametric testing and then conducted a multivariate analysis. Our next step involved the use of an age-period-cohort (APC) model to measure the degree of impact three points of data, experience (experience years), the historical and environmental context of the data (survey year), and physician cohort (registration year) had on the movement of each physician.ResultsThe ratio of female physicians who selected an urban area as their first working location was higher than that of male physicians. However, the selection of an urban area was becoming more popular as a first working location for both males and females as the year of data increased. The overall distance of geographical movement for female physicians was less than it was for male physicians. Physicians moved the greatest distance between their second and fourth years following license acquisition, at which point the time distance became shorter. The median time distance was 46 min in 2000 and 22 min in 2008. The physicians in our study did not move far from their first working location, and the overall distance of movement lessened in the more recent years of study. The median distance of movement after 20 years was 25.9 km for male physicians, and 19.1 km for female physicians. The results of the APC model indicated that the effects of experience years (age) gradually declined, that the survey year (period) effects increased, and that the registration year (cohort) effects increased initially before leveling off.ConclusionsThe trends following the introduction of the new mandatory training system in 2004 may imply that the concentration of physicians in Japan’s urban areas is expected to increase. After 2000, the effect of that period on physicians explains their geographical movements more so than the factor of their age.

Determining the distance patterns in the movements of future doctors in UK between 2002 and 2015: a retrospective cohort study

“…7 This reduced between 1974 and 1994, although increased again in later years and by 2006 it was greater than the 1974 levels. 10 While previous research focused on the use of simple cross-tabulation, 9 the Gini coefficient 11 and generalised linear models 12 ; they were often not sufficient to disentangle the complexity of the movements of doctors. To understand the spatial scales and explanatory factors associated with the movements of entrant medical students and junior doctors, in addition to the traditional statistical analyses listed above, we have also employed a new method, the Leslie matrix (usually applied in biology).…”

Starter Kit for Geotagging and Geovisualization in Health Care: Resource Paper

“…Geotagging has been used for multiple purposes in health care. Some of the main benefits of geotagging are (1) being a better tool for health care data's visualization [6,7], (2) supporting time domain data analysis [8], (3) facilitating cross-analysis of multiple data types [9][10][11], and (4) enabling automatic data analysis [12][13][14].…”

“…It can be employed to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions (eg, evaluating the effectiveness of social distancing for individual neighborhoods in order to provide a more reasonable distribution of resources to assist high-risk populations) [ 15 ], predict trends in population health and health care (eg, using Twitter data to advance Zika virus surveillance) [ 16 ], determine the urgency level of interventions (eg, generating acute ischemic stroke alert or detecting COVID-19 symptoms, testing access, and recovery) [ 17 , 18 ], and identify areas that require further investigation (eg, worsening of the population health due to environmental pollution) [ 19 ]. Researchers of a study conducted in Japan in 2018 obtained geographical movement of physicians to determine the most favorable location and the median distance of geographical movement of female and male groups of health care providers [ 8 ]. The authors concluded that physicians preferred to work in urban areas but there was a higher rate of female physicians who had their first preference of working location as urban areas.…”

“…Also, the overall distance of geographical movement among female providers was lower compared with male physicians. Finally, the greatest moving distance occurred between their second and fourth years after obtaining their medical license [ 8 ].…”