Accessibility and quality of medical service in the context of health care modernization

Assessment of access to health care is a complicated scientific and practical problem. The solution can not be limited to formal indicators of state and departmental statistics. Existing solely for the purpose to preserve the citizens’ health, the health care system must be based and reconstructed on the opinion of its customers, the territory’s residents who receive medical services under the state guarantees program. That is why, the necessary, if not the most important, component to assess the health care access is sociological data analysis. The Institute of Socio-Economic Development of Territories of the Russian Academy of Sciences has carried out the measurement and analysis of the Vologda Oblast population’s estimates of the access to medical services and its quality, provided by regional health institutions. This study is especially important because a number of reforms and the Program of Health Care Modernization have been implemented in the Russian health care over the last years. The authors have found out that the reforms improved the provision of the medical institutions with equipment, but the problem of staff shortage was not solved. What is more, the region’s residents are still concerned about ethics violations, medical workers’ rude behavior and difficulty to make an appointment at the doctor’s. These problems remain acute.