Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain a global health challenge due to number of deaths and use of healthcare services related to the condition. Although a plethora of studies have shown the impact of unemployment on health outcomes, evidence on the unemployment effects on the demand for expensive cardiac healthcare services is rare. This study exploits longitudinal cohort dataset to examine the impact of variations in local level unemployment rate on the demand for healthcare services among working aged people with CVD in Australia. Our findings show an inverse relationship between unemployment and the demand for healthcare services. Specifically, we find that a rising unemployment reduces the demand for primary and secondary healthcare services, with the largest effect observed for hospital admissions and hospitalisation days. We further show that rising unemployment at the local level has a greater impact on CVD patients with comorbidities and those who live in nonremote areas. Finally, our estimates suggest that increasing local level unemployment averts a substantial number of healthcare services use, leading to an unintended cost savings of $1.2 million to the health sector.

心血管疾病 (CVD) 仍然是全球健康挑战，因为与该疾病相关的死亡人数和医疗保健服务的使用。尽管大量研究表明失业对健康结果的影响，但关于失业对昂贵心脏保健服务需求的影响的证据很少。本研究利用纵向队列数据集来检查地方失业率的变化对澳大利亚患有 CVD 的工作老年人对医疗保健服务需求的影响。我们的研究结果显示失业与医疗保健服务需求之间呈负相关。具体而言，我们发现失业率上升降低了对初级和二级医疗保健服务的需求，其中对住院人数和住院天数的影响最大。我们进一步表明，地方层面的失业率上升对患有合并症的 CVD 患者和居住在非偏远地区的患者有更大的影响。最后，我们的估计表明，地方失业率的增加避免了大量医疗保健服务的使用，从而为卫生部门意外节省了 120 万美元的成本。