Measuring inequalities in the public health workforce at county-level Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in China

Cai, Weiqin; Li, Chengyue; Sun, Mei; Hao, Mo

Decomposition of PHW inequalities Regional-level contribution to overall inequality Table 2 provides a decomposition of overall inter-county inequality into within-and between-region inequality. Within-region inequality accounted for at least 98.5% of overall inter-county inequality in the distribution of all Hence, in the distribution of PHWs, within-region inequalities caused almost all inter-county inequality. Table 1 summarizes the PHW distribution within regions and displays the number of counties and health workers, and the mean, minimum, and maximum county density per 10,000 population, and the three inequality measures. The overall density of CDC staff in China was 1.01 per 10,000 population, and the overall density of health professionals and field epidemiological investigators was 0.79 and 0.40 per 1000 population, respectively. The density of the three categories of PHW did not vary greatly between regions, and was similar to the national level. As the latter are a subset of staff and health professionals, the densities per 10,000 population were lower for field epidemiological investigators than for the other categories. For China as a whole, there were 0.40 field epidemiological investigators per 10,000 population, ranging from 0.38 in the West region to 0.43 in the East region.