关键词: 农民工, 医疗行为, 空间结构, 城中村

Abstract:

China's national medical system is being reformed, while floating workers are excluded outside the system. Current research shows that the general health situation of floating workers is rather miserable, such as poor working and living conditions, low health capacity, lack of health care awareness and so on. Due to inadequate health awareness and low economic status, they seldom make full use of public health care infrastructures to fulfil their medical needs, of which health guidance and regular body check top the priority. Their health care behaviors, health care seeking strategies and accessibility to medical services are almost ignored in recent years. Based on quantitative and qualitative survey, field investigation, as well as mapping of health facilities, we chose one of the typical urban villages-Xinfenghuang Village as a case study and conducted further research. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the health situation of floating workers, accessibility of different kinds of health facilities and to clarify the characteristics of their health care behaviors, in order to bring about practical suggestions on improvement of life quality of floating workers in urban villages. Although the geographical accessibility of health facilities is quite high, their real use is affected by several negative factors, including long waiting time, being unable to afford the direct expenses and medicine, inconvenient time and having difficulty asking for leave and so on. Thus they try to meet their medical needs in different ways, which can be divided into three groups in terms of characteristics: self-reliance, social capital reliance, and economic reliance. The most outstanding characteristics of self-reliance group are to cope with the diseases by themselves, like taking medicine without action. The group of social capital reliance can get help from social network consisting of relatives, countrymen and neighborhoods. The group of economic reliance, which is very small, positively responds to health problems because of their better economic status than the others. From spatial perspective, the health care behavior of floating workers accords with the disciplinarian of distance-decay, which forms a five-ringed structure. The medical needs of floating population should be considered into the planning of health care infrastructures and promotion of national medical system.

Key words: floating workers, health care behavior, spatial structure, urban village