Non-participation modestly increased with distance to the examination clinic among adults in Finnish health examination surveys

Aims: Health examination surveys (HES) provide important information about population health and health-related factors, but declining participation rates threaten the representativeness of collected data. It is hard to conduct national HESs at examination clinics near to every sampled individual. Thus, it is interesting to look into the possible association between the distance from home to the examination clinic and non-participation, and whether there is a certain distance after which the participation activity decreases considerably. Methods: Data from two national HESs conducted in Finland in 2011 and 2012 were used and a logistic regression model was fitted to investigate how distanc…