Data Collection

The nationwide data were collected from the Taiwan Academy of Hospice Palliative Medicine, the National Health Insurance Administration of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and the open database maintained by the government of Taiwan (http://data.gov.tw/). The services provided by the palliative care units in Taiwan are covered by the National Health Insurance. Therefore, the database from the National Health Insurance Administration of the Ministry of Health and Welfare included all the information of palliative care units in Taiwan. These data included the names of palliative care units, and the variables analyzed included the level of medical facilities, the number of beds in each palliative care unit, and the degree of urbanization and the population of the area served by each unit. The degree of urbanization was defined using the categorizing methods of Liu et al, which divide the degree of urbanization into 7 types, namely, highly urbanized towns, medium urbanized towns, emerging towns, general towns and cities, aging towns, agricultural towns, and remote towns.²¹