Geographic distribution of primary care physicians in Japan and Britain.

Geographic distributions of primary care physicians in Japan and Britain were compared with each other. Regional variation in the number of primary care physicians per unit population was larger in Japan than in Britain. The Gini coefficient of primary care physicians against population in Japan (0.1755) was more than twice that observed for Britain (0.0837), indicating a substantially less equal distribution in Japan. The results can probably be explained by differences in the primary care systems of the two countries.