Unmet Needs as Sociomedical Indicators

Abstract

This paper discusses the Meharry Medical College Study of Unmet Needs designed to measure the effectiveness of alternative health care delivery systems: (a) comprehensive care with broad outreach, (b) comprehensive care with limited outreach, and (c) traditional care. Unmet needs are defined as the differences between services judged necessary to deal appropriately with health problems and services actually received. The central hypothesis is that comprehensive health programs will be more effective than traditional care in reducing unmet needs. Unmet needs are viewed as measures of program outcome and are one of several types of sociomedical indicators which use factors other than biomedical or biological states as measures of outcome. The distinction is made between unmet needs indicators and health status indicators. Various approaches to measuring unmet needs are discussed and the relatively limited focus of these is contrasted with the more comprehensive Meharry approach. Household interviews and clinical examinations provide the data base for deriving professional judgments of unmet needs in the medical, dental, nursing, and social services areas. The Meharry work suggests several areas in which further work on unmet needs would be useful.