The Accessibility of Primary Care and Paediatric Hospitalisations for Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions in Czechia

Lenka Šlegerová

No 2024/13, Working Papers IES from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies

Abstract: This study evaluates the accessibility of primary care for children in Czechia in light of the declining numbers of general practitioners and the rising numbers of children without a practitioner. We show that children largely receive primary care outside their district of administrative residence, that the average number of children registered per practitioner is increasing, and that the share of children without a practitioner was over 6% in 2022. This study further challenges the use of hospital admissions for ambulatory care sensitive conditions as a measure of the accessibility and quality of primary care. We build a fixed-effects model for district-level data on paediatric hospital admissions and the utilisation of primary care between 2010 and 2019 in Czechia. Our focus is on the effect that the number of registered and treated children per primary-care physician has on the composition of paediatric hospital admissions. We find no significant relationship between the variables of our interest. Therefore, we suggest that hospital admissions for ambulatory care sensitive conditions are not a good measure of the accessibility and quality of primary care for the child population in Czechia, a country with compulsory health insurance and no gatekeeping of primary care.

Keywords: accessibility of primary care; paediatric hospital admissions; ambulatory care sensitive conditions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2024-03, Revised 2024-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-tra
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2024_13

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