Medical resource allocation is an increasingly crucial issue. It is vital to understand residents’ (people living in the local area) evaluation of it. This study explores residents’ evaluation of medical resource allocation and its determinants with the dimensions of medical resource adequacy, balance, publicness, and accessibility. We used data from the China General Social Survey (CGSS). Binary logistic regression models were constructed from the four dimensions separately, and we compared the differences among them. The study’s results showed that accessibility and publicness are the highest and lowest dimensions of residents’ evaluation, respectively. The high evaluation of social equity may be a positive contributor to a higher evaluation of publicness and accessibility. The central region residents had the lowest evaluation of adequacy (OR = 0.697, p = 0.010) and balance (OR = 0.642, p = 0.008). To sum up, perceived social equity, social trust, and social class are crucial factors. Based on the results, the government should strengthen the supervision of the medical market, increase financial support for the health field in the central region, and establish a multi-level medical security system that may help optimize the allocation.

PurposeThis paper aims to evaluate the prevalence of self-medication and its associated factors among the Chinese elderly. Also, according to whether the elderly communicate with doctors (no matter before or after self-medication), we aimed to categorize self-medication and explore the associated factors.MethodsIt was a cross-sectional study. Data were derived from the 2018 wave of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). According to whether communicate with doctors or not, self-medication was reclassified as “self-medicate and NOT communicating with a doctor,” and “self-medicate and communicate with a doctor.” A binary logistic regression was used to identify which elderly were more likely to self-medicate, and a multinomial logistic regression was applied to explore the associated influencing factors of self-medication classifications.ResultsA total of 17,445 individuals aged ≥45 years were enrolled. The prevalence of self-medication was 58.60%. Self-medication was strongly associated with sex, education level, pension, self-reported general health status, chronic illness, satisfaction with local medical services, and three province-level socioeconomic welfare variables. About 19.64% of self-medication populations had communicated with a doctor. Higher education level and younger age were significantly associated with a higher probability of “self-medication and communication with a doctor.”ConclusionThe prevalence of self-medication among the Chinese elderly is increasing over the year. Health education on appropriate medication use targeting elder adults with low education levels is highly recommended. The typology of self-medication and its factors are new research entry points and could be meaningful for future studies.