The impact of temporary work has been studied extensively in the literature, but little is known about the implications of temporary work in the healthcare sector. In this paper, we investigate the impact of locum doctors on patients’ satisfaction, prescription behaviours and emergency admissions using a unique dataset that matches the information on temporary contracts for 6781 healthcare practices in England from 2017 to 2021, along with patient satisfaction ratings and psychotropic medication drug prescriptions.
We employ panel data techniques that leverage both the cross-sectional and temporal dimensions of the dataset to analyse the relationship between locum doctors and patients’ health outcomes. Our findings indicate that patient satisfaction is lower in practices with more temporary job contracts. This result supports our hypothesis that patients may prefer a less precarious relationship with their healthcare providers.
We also find a negative association between the higher share of locums and antibiotic, infection, analgesic and statins prescriptions. The reduced time that locums may have to engage with their patients may incentivize them to under-prescribe, all these types of medications. This suggests that locum doctors may have an adverse impact on the appropriateness of treatments for patients. We do not find any significant effect on the number of emergency admissions at the practice level.
Our results have significant implications for policy interventions aimed at increasing the flexibility of the labour market in the healthcare sector. Such reforms should also consider the economic and social costs of the changes, including the psychological well-being of patients and the appropriateness of their treatments. Our study highlights the importance of ensuring that temporary work arrangements in healthcare do not compromise the quality of patient care and treatment outcomes.
Presented by:
Dr Catia Nicodemo (University of Oxford)
Date & time:
1 Nov 2023 12:30 pm - 1 Nov 2023 13:30 pm
Venue:
The seminar will be held in person at 2N2.4.16 and online. Please contact the seminar organisers for the zoom call details at iserseminars@essex.ac.uk.
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