Author Description

This dissertation, "Village Doctor as Street-level Bureaucrat and the Impact on Health Care Services in Rural China" by Nan, Zhao,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: The changes in the health care system have been remarkable over the past decades, along with the rapid economic development of China. The overall living standard of rural residents has generally improved; however, health expenses still make up a large part of their annual expenditure. During the new reform period, the importance of the village doctor has been emphasized by many scholars, and yet there are few studies conducted from the perspective of interactions between health administration, village doctor and rural resident to discover the invisible factors that influence the delivery of the health care service. Thus, this study aims to explore the street-level bureaucracy within the rural health care sector and its impact on rural residents. Guided by the Street-level Bureaucracy Theory and its application in public agency research, this study explores street-level bureaucracy in the grassroots health care sector in terms of health care regulation and provision before and after the recent series of health care reforms, and evaluates its impact on rural residents by analyzing health equity in terms of health care access, and the actual working and living conditions of the village doctor were identified. Apart from the official statistical data from document analysis and internet resources, the voices and advice of village doctors and rural residents in Jiangsu Province were also obtained from in-depth interviews, which pr