Who calls Swedish Health Care Direct '1177'?
For some time now, all Swedish regions have been connected to the telenursing service Swedish Healthcare Direct (SHD), or ‘1177'. But does that mean we have equitable access to health care? Perhaps not. A recent study shows that both language and gender influences who uses the service.
A recent study of authentic calls made to '1177' published in Clinical Nursing Studies shows that the most common caller is a young woman who is fluent in Swedish. According to the authors, it is important that we make sure that telenursing doesn't become a service only for them.
One of the questions they posed was whether men and women are given the same advice. The analysis shows that men, and especially fathers, received more referrals to general practitioners than women. This is interesting, especially since most of the calls about children were made by women.
Anna T. Höglund (Link removed) , Associate Professor of Ethics at the Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics and one of the authors, says that the results confirm previous international research.
The nurses who answer the calls have a gatekeeping role and the authors fear that the differences on this first level of health care could be reproduced at other levels in the health care system. But what can we do if we strive for more equal access to health care?
"We point to campaigns that encourage men to call. And to break the language barrier, we suggest more frequent use of translators", says Anna T. Höglund.
Read article in Clinical Nursing Studies:Hakimnia R, Clarsson M, Höglund AT, Holmström IK, Doing gender in the context of telenursing: Analyses of authentic calls to a telenursing site in Sweden, Clinical Nursing Studies 2015;3(2):24-30.