雙親健康行為群聚類別與嬰兒醫療利用之關係

The Association Between Parental Health Behavior Cluster Type and Infant Healthcare Utilization

Background: Research has shown that parental health or health behaviors are associated with emergency visits and hospital admissions among infants. Thus far, research treats each parental health behavior as an independent predictor and fails to consider parents jointly and how their health behaviors collectively affect infants’healthcare utilization.
Purpose: This study aims to investigate the association between parental health behavior cluster and healthcare utilization in infants.
Methods: This study uses the first wave of data from the Taiwan Birth Cohort Study（TBCS）commissioned by the Health Promotion Administration, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taiwan. We employed cluster analysis to analyze parental health behaviors. We then incorporated the resulting health behavior clusters as independent variables in a logit model to test their associations with infants’emergency care and hospital admissions.
Results: We find that infants who were born in a“smoking, alcohol, and drinking family”were more likely to use emergency services（OR=1.19；95% CI: 1.03-1.36）and have more hospital admission（OR=1.22；95% CI: 1.05-1.42）.
Conclusions/Implications for Practice: Future prenatal education programs or education programs in well-baby clinics should be family-centered. In particular, healthcare professionals should inquire about parents’health behaviors, especially addictive behaviors such as smoking, and address those factors in the education program. In addition, health education strategies such as face-to-face education, web-based or app-based education platform, and referral services, need to tailor to the family’s condition. It is also important to emphasize the concept of intergenerational health in health education materials and campaigns, e.g. citing evidence that parent’s unhealthy behaviors are associated with increased risk of emergency and hospital admissions in infant so as to help patients understand the impacts of their health behaviors on their children.