Dispensing practices and antibiotic use

Massimo Filippini, Giuliano Masiero and Karine Moschetti
Additional contact information
Karine Moschetti: Department of Economics, University of Lugano, Switzerland

Quaderni della facoltà di Scienze economiche dell'Università di Lugano from USI Università della Svizzera italiana

Abstract: The regulation on prescribing and dispensing of antibiotics has a double purpose: to enhance access to antibiotic treatment and to reduce the inappropriate use of drugs. Nevertheless, incentives to dispensing physicians may lead to inefficiencies. We sketch a theoretical model of the market for antibiotic treatment and empirically investigate the impact of self-dispensing on the per capita outpatient antibiotic consumption using data from small geographic areas in Switzerland. We find evidence that a greater proportion of dispensing practices is associated with higher levels of antibiotic use. This suggests that health authorities have a margin to adjust economic incentives on dispensing practices in order to reduce antibiotic misuse.

Keywords: Dispensing; Antibiotic use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D21 D43 D81 D82 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2008-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://doc.rero.ch/lm.php?url=1000,42,6,20081016104949-ZL/wp0808.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Dispensing practices and antibiotic use (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lug:wpaper:0808

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Quaderni della facoltà di Scienze economiche dell'Università di Lugano from USI Università della Svizzera italiana
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alessio Tutino ().